Thorium Reader 2023: what's new in the free, accessible desktop ebook reader | DPUB Summit 2023

Thorium Reader is EDRLab's free, open-source reading app for Windows, macOS and Linux, built with accessibility at its core. Daniel Weck, one of its lead developers, presents what changed in 2023 and what comes next. Thorium reads EPUB 2 and EPUB 3 (reflowable and fixed layout, with media overlays), DAISY 2.02 and 3, W3C and Readium audiobooks, Divina comics and PDF, and handles LCP-protected purchases and library loans through OPDS catalogues. Version 2.2.0 (November 2022) was downloaded close to 50,000 times. A documentation site now lives at thorium.edrlab.org, and the interface is available in 20 languages, with better Japanese vertical writing on the way. Daniel Weck walks through its accessibility features: a 100% score on EPUBTest (annotations excepted, now in development), support for NVDA, JAWS, VoiceOver and Narrator, display of accessibility metadata following EPUB Accessibility 1.1, a keyboard shortcut editor, navigation history, Go to page with print page lists, a "Where am I?" announcement, native MathML rendering as an alternative to MathJax, pop-up footnotes, multilingual text-to-speech, image zoom, accessible search results and an advanced bookshelf view with sorting and tags. The roadmap includes annotations, Japanese right-to-left pagination and SVG zoom. Speaker Daniel Weck, Software Engineer, EDRLab and DAISY Consortium Thorium Reader: https://thorium.edrlab.org Chapters 0:00 Introduction 1:47 About Thorium Reader 3:31 Releases and the new documentation website 7:03 20 languages and Japanese vertical writing 8:17 Supported formats 9:46 Library and reading views 13:18 Fixed layout, media overlays and audiobooks 16:24 Accessibility: EPUBTest and screen readers 17:59 Accessibility metadata display 19:51 Keyboard shortcut editor 21:08 Navigation history, Go to page, table of contents 24:42 "Where am I?" reading context 27:05 MathML support 28:59 Pop-up footnotes and text-to-speech 32:34 Image zoom and text search 35:12 Advanced bookshelf view 38:56 Roadmap: annotations 40:17 Q&A Recorded at the Digital Publishing Summit 2023, organised online by EDRLab (European Digital Reading Lab) from 19 to 23 June 2023.