IDPF EPUBZone | By Bill Kasdorf, Vice President and Principal Consultant, Apex Content & Media; IDPF Board Member

The IDPF places a high priority on collaborating with related organizations. Two of the most in-depth such collaborations are with the IMS Global Learning Consortium on educational issues and the DAISY Consortium on accessibility issues. There couldn’t be a better example of the importance of both of these partnerships than the EPUB Accessibility Summit, graciously hosted by IMS at their quarterly meeting in Baltimore on February 24.

As we work to foster the adoption of EPUB throughout the publishing ecosystem—it’s not just for books, and especially not just for trade books!—great progress is being made in the areas of education and accessibility, two areas that have much in common. EPUB, especially in the context of EDUPUB and the EPUB for Education profile, is becoming a core standard in the education technology space, so much of which is based on IMS standards; and thanks largely to our long partnership with DAISY, EPUB is now widely considered the best format in which to provide content that is accessible to users of assistive technology.