How long does it take to upgrade an eBook?

The older I get, the more comfortable I become with complaining. Not merely moaning on social media, but writing a direct email to the perpetrator of some annoyance.

I'd purchased an eBook and was appalled by how crappy the accessibility was. If you don't know, modern ePub books are just HTML wrapped in a zip file. They have all of the accessibility advantages of the web and should be easy to read no matter if you're sighted or not.

But not this eBook! Part of the story concerned WhatsApp messages sent by the protagonist. Here's one of them:

See that smudge in the middle? The one smaller than a full stop? That's meant to be an emoji. Rather than use an actual emoji, they've stuck in a tiny pixel image which won't scale with text size.

Here is is:

Can't see it? Let me blow it up to a more readable size.

OK, that's annoying for sighted readers, but just about understandable. What about people who are using a screen reader? Luckily, ePubs can use HTML's "alt text" feature which will describe an image which can't be seen.

Curses! That's, perhaps, not too annoying for a decorative image - but later in the book there are pictures of a ransom note. Despite the plot-twisting text in the illustration, the alt text just says "image".

I found the publisher's website and scoffed at their proclaimed accessibility statement. I sent them an email which basically consisted of the above. I realised it was probably futile, but I've got to spend my privilege points somehow.

The next day, they wrote back!

I wanted to reply to let you know we are taking our commitments to accessibility in our ebooks seriously […] I will get our ebook team to check this as a matter of urgency and get back to you with an update.

Fair play. But talk is cheap, would they actually take action? A few days later, they sent a follow-up:

We have checked the file for this title again and found issues with it. We have sent this back to the conversion house to have the file corrected and expect this to be delivered by the end of the week. We would then expect this corrected version to be with Kobo by the end of the following week, i.e. 25th July.

We have also been spot-checking other files to see if there is a wider issue and where necessary will follow the same workflow to ensure fully accessible versions are available as widely as possible.

And, you know what, I think that's totally reasonable. Yeah, they should have caught it before publication - but it is a complex book and they're a small publisher. They took my complaint seriously and actually did something about it.

A week or so rolled by and they sent me this:

Just to update you that we have been back and forth with the conversion house getting this title up to scratch. There were various complicating factors which should now be resolved and an updated file has now been distributed and should be available through your chosen retailer presently. If you have any other queries please do let us know.

I logged on to my eBook provider, clicked "read" and…

It was fixed! All the images had decent alt text as well.

Rather annoyingly, the retailer didn't notify me that there was an update available. I can't blame the publisher for that though.

Still, 3 weeks from report to fix is pretty good I reckon.

When I last contacted a publisher about a mistake in their ebook, it took over 3 months to fix it. Perhaps things are slowly getting better?

Anyway, please complain about poor accessibility. Don't shout into the void of social media - write a polite but insistent email telling (not asking) people to fix their shit. Sometimes, just sometimes, it does work.

Anyway you should read The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels by Janice Hallett - it is brilliant and accessible.