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Table of Contents
Children’s Books
There are two forms of children’s books: Picture Books and Illustrated Books. The formatting and Alt-text for these types of books are slightly different than others. This section will show you how format these books, as well as tips and examples of image descriptions.
Picture Books
Picture books are books were there are more images than text. Often the text will be part of the image itself, so we have developed a way to describe this book for conversion. Though these are mainly children’s books, sometimes you will have other reading level books that are heavily illustrated. With children’s books, most of the time, they do not have tables of contents or chapter headings, and their text is usually part of an image, or they are image-heavy.
If the book you are working on is image-based (i.e. the text is part of the image), then you will need to transcribe the text below the image. You will also need to create headings, and add a producer’s note at the beginning of the book stating why you did so.
Illustrated Books
Illustrated books are children’s book for a higher reading level, and there is more text than images in these types of books. Often, the text will not be part of the image itself, as the images work more to complement the descriptions presented in the main content. There is more text than images within the book.
If the book you are working on is text heavy with complementary images, then you just need to add Alt-Text. The rest of the book can be formatted as you would a standard etext book. For the most part the same standards for Alt-Text apply to these types of images, but there are some additional points you should keep in mind as you describe the image:
- Make sure that the words you choose are at the same reading level as the book.
- Reading text around the image can help you find this tone and inform your description.
- With children’s illustrations, the image is often already described in the text. In this case, you can take that same language from the text and describe only what you see in the image you are describing.
- If you find the image is already fully described in the text, just write a basic description so that the image has Alt-text, but is not repetitive in description.
For more information about formatting and book sections please see below.
Formatting for Children’s Books:
Book Sections for Children’s Books:
Archive Q&A
Q: For children's books, they don't normally have chapters, so we have to "divide each page into page numbers that match the original pages". For my book, Weekend Dad, when I look at the e-reader, the original pages don't have page numbers. How do I create headings with page numbers that match original pages, if the original pages do not have page numbers? Sorry if this question is weird and confusing.
A: Good Question! You can assign the first page of the story as Page One (heading 1) if there are no page numbers.
Q: What do I do if there aren't any page numbers in a kid's book? The wiki says to make sure my page numbers that I'm using for page headings match up with the book. I'm working on Birdsong and I'm using Calibre to view it and don't see any page numbers.
A: I opened this up in my Kindle reader to check if this was an issue with Calibre (.azw3 is a kindle file) and it still did not show numbers. In this case just assign the headings in order of the pages they appear (i.e. the first page of the story is Page One and so on.)
