Region-based navigation

[gregoriopellegrino]

Section

Region-based navigation

Describe the problem

The Region-based navigation section refers to EPUB Region-Based Navigation 1.0. Is this specification still active? Has it been adopted?

Describe the fix or new feature you propose

No response

[sueneu]

Widespread support for region based navigation would be great thing for people who like comics.

As far as I know, there has been little reading system support for it.

Ken Jones might be good to talk to. His authoring product, CircularFlo, will make region based navigation but the only RS I know of that supports it is Colibrio.

One big obstacle to widespread adoption of this navigation standard is that Amazon has a propriety technology that does the same thing. It would be a burden on publishers to create two version of a comic with two different navigation technologies.

For instance:
Some of the comics we have in studio are 200+ pages with 4, 5 or more panels per page. Auto generating only goes so far with most titles. Any title where art or text breaks a panel edge requires a person to make a decision and create the navigational regions. This can be a significant cost in time and labor.

I hope I am wrong about RS support.

[gregoriopellegrino]

The fact is that this is an IDPF document, I'm not sure it's a W3C specification that we can refer to...

[sueneu]

Agreed. Apologies if I missed the focus of your comment. Where in the documentation are we referring to this?

[gregoriopellegrino]

Here: https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/w3c/epub-specs/blob/fxl-a11y-tech-restructure/wg-notes/fxl-a11y-tech/index.html

[HadrienGardeur]

With what I'm currently pushing for in SMIL (see #2919 and #2883), I don't think that region-based navigation would be required as a separate spec anymore.

Take a look at the example that I've created and more specifically the SMIL for the first page.

With this SMIL, you get:

• panel by panel navigation
• textual and audio descriptions for panels
• textual and audio equivalent for textOnVisual

Since <audio> is optional with our content model in EPUB, the only requirement would be a textual equivalent.

There are some subtle differences though:

• region-based navigation also supports circular and polygonal fragments in addition to rectangles
• it can also convey very minimal metadata (color and character)
• and provides supports for regions that require a synthetic spread