GripNews➤ A. A. Milne's《小熊維尼》迎向無障礙閱讀的新里程碑
✤ https://tilde.zone/@gluejar/113749300977151258
這項工程已進行2年多，為A. A. Milne的《小熊維尼》製作了一本全面無障礙的電子書籍，完全屬於公共領域，促進閱讀無障礙化。透過此計畫，使得這部經典作品得以自由分享至全球，同時邀請更多人參與為視障者提供影像描述。該工程嘗試運用人工智慧為複雜圖像創建描述，但目前仍需人類編輯。
+ 這項計畫在推動文學作品無障礙閱讀方面做出了重要貢獻，希望更多作品能受益於此。
+ 這個計畫展現了科技和人文價值的完美結合，是一個令人振奮的發展。
#公共領域 #電子書籍 #無障礙閱讀 #AI影像描述
Eric Hellman (@gluejar@tilde.zone)
Here's something I've been working on for over 2 years, and I wanted to have something to show before Public Domain Day tomorrow: a fully accessible ebook, completely in the Public Domain. A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh. https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/67098 The conversion of all 75,000 texts in Project Gutenberg to Accessible EPUB3 is an ongoing collective effort, but the last missing piece for Pooh was to supply image descriptions in alt text worthy of this iconic work. I hope we've mostly succeeded! With work being done to implement the Marrakesh Treaty, national "authorized entities" are now able to share accessible versions of in-copyright works with each other internationally, but we don't have to wait for that in the case of works in the Public Domain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marrakesh_VIP_Treaty Project Gutenberg's accessible version of Winnie-the-Pooh can be shared freely throughout the world. If you don't like the added alt text, you are free to change it! (but maybe you'd prefer to work on one of the thousands of books that don't yet have image descriptions for the visually impaired!) Creating alt text for a work of fiction is both hard work and a lot of fun. The descriptions have to fit in to the narrative of the text, without adding subjective interpretation of the illustrations. Not easy at all! For example, the alt text for the illustration showing Pooh peering up at the bees can't call them bees, because in the next sentence, Pooh thinks: "That buzzing-noise means something. You don't get a buzzing-noise like that, just buzzing and buzzing, without its meaning something." https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/67098/pg67098-images.html#img_images_illus15.jpg For Pooh, some technical corrections were necessary as well. The horizontal rules around the illustrations needed to be silenced with the HTML5 aria-hidden attribute. Six illustrations needed to be moved up or down a sentence to fit into the narrative. In Chapter 7, the sentence: "If this is flying I shall never really take to it." had been rendered across 3 lines with margins and spaces, jumbling the word order. A change to vertical-align rendering makes it more accessible to everybody - I could copy and paste it! https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/67098/pg67098-images.html#images/illus73.jpg We've played with AI for image description, and the results are quite good for complex figures and the like, but it will be quite a while before AI image descriptions can be set loose without human editors, especially for works like Pooh. AI's can completely whiff on the simplest images! We're working to create UIs for alt text editing and creation to enable more people to help out in accessibility mitigation. Maybe one of these people will be you! There are thousand of books that need help.