W3C

EPUB Fixed Layout Accessibility Taskforce — PMWG

26 August 2025

Attendees

Present
Charles LaPierre, Ken Jones, Gregorio Pellegrino, Simon_M
Regrets
-
Chair
Wendy Reid
Scribe
Charles LaPierre

Meeting minutes

<Wendy Reid> date: 2025-08-26

PR 2776 - w3c/epub-specs#2776

<Wendy Reid> https://cdn.statically.io/gh/w3c/epub-specs/fxl-a11y-updates/wg-notes/fxl-a11y/index.html

<Wendy Reid> Discussing Gauthier's comments, wanting to move things into the authoring section of the document.

<Wendy Reid> Some discussion of extended description and what it means for FXL.

<Wendy Reid> Fallbacks and expectations of the reader/reading system. Different from the web.

<Wendy Reid> Tension of webbiness and epub, we want books to be more webby, but we also want the stability of the print book.

<Wendy Reid> Fallback as alternative, semantically feels wrong, providing an alternative feels like a different feature.

<Wendy Reid> Do we have known cases where people are using fallbacks as alternatives?

<Wendy Reid> Images in spine, tension of some people wanting this vs the need in the spec for the XHTML

<Wendy Reid> New ideas for fixed layout and comic rendering, JSON, etc.

<Wendy Reid> Need further discussion about fallbacks vs alternatives, do we need to explore the difference.

<Wendy Reid> Do we need to think about new features for a new EPUB vs EPUB3

<Wendy Reid> [Charles demos a DAISY tool called FIDO]

Fido's Github Repo: ways2read/fido-ai

<Ken Jones> Link to TED talk mentioned by DaleRogers https://www.ted.com/talks/scott_mccloud_the_visual_magic_of_comics

Minutes manually created (not a transcript), formatted by scribe.perl version 244 (Thu Feb 27 01:23:09 2025 UTC).