If a reader gets stuck on the difference between a product name and an ingredient name, can they reach that explanation without starting the book again? Someone looking into dental care support may need a different route: from an explanation of a scheme to finding the institution that handles it. The route through the information was a major part of the work when I made two Korean-language health guides in May 2026.
I had begun thinking about document structure while volunteering to transcribe books for blind readers at university. Reading a page by eye allows quick movement between headings and tables; making the same material followable in audio requires attention to heading levels and sequence. For these guides, I worked on the explanations and the ebook structure together, covering food, drug and Korean-medicine information in one book and oral-health access for people with disabilities in the other.
Both were issued as non-commercial Korean-language ebooks, with PDF and EPUB files, and donated to Korea's National Library for the Disabled. The food and medicine guide has 75 PDF pages; the oral-health guide has 73.
Keeping the terms, then giving readers somewhere to go
The first book, whose Korean title translates as Easy Access to Food, Drug, and Korean Medicine Information for Information-Vulnerable Groups, explains the fields readers encounter in information about medicines, health supplements, herbal preparations and Korean medicines. Removing every unfamiliar term would leave readers unprepared for the actual label, so I kept the official terms and placed explanations beside them.
Chapter 2 starts with product and ingredient names, then works through indications, directions and dosage, and precautions. Readers who need the vocabulary can turn to Chapter 7; those preparing questions for a health professional can use Chapter 6 and the consultation question cards in Appendix B. I gave these different tasks their own places in the book instead of expecting every reader to take the same route.
A separate section gathers routes to official information, including Korea's drug-safety and food-safety portals. This lets the guide point back to the information it explains. The book was issued by 온결 on 1 May 2026; its copyright page carries ISBN 979-11-999127-0-0.
Connecting dental support schemes to information routes
The second book is titled 공공데이터로 본 장애인 구강건강 접근권 안내서—a guide to oral-health access for people with disabilities through public data. It moves from public material on oral-health disparities to specialist dental centres and support schemes, then to ways of finding the relevant information. I brought together material distributed across bodies including the Ministry of Health and Welfare, the National Rehabilitation Center and the National Health Insurance Service.
The chapters on dental centres and Medical Aid or dental support have distinct roles. Later sections provide official information routes, a directory of centres and a policy glossary. A list of institutions alone would leave their roles unexplained; a description of a scheme alone would leave the reader looking for somewhere to check it. I wanted the book to connect those two tasks.
It does not recommend a provider or treatment, or decide whether a reader qualifies for support. I scoped both books as educational guides to reading public information available at publication and preparing questions for health professionals, rather than guides to diagnosis or prescribing. Sources remain alongside the explanations because services and product information can change. The oral-health guide was issued on 6 May 2026 with ISBN 979-11-999127-1-7.
Turning the manuscript into a navigable file
To accommodate screen readers, which read screen content aloud, I wrote out material that would otherwise require moving between table cells and added recaps at the ends of chapters. Shorter passages still need a usable structure around them, so the EPUBs also distinguish chapters from their sections.
An EPUB packages the text with a table of contents and information about its reading order. In these books, each chapter has its own XHTML file, with h1 for the chapter title and h2 for its sections. “Reading a medicine label,” for example, contains a separate section on product and ingredient names. The headings have a role in the file, beyond looking larger on the page.
The links in nav.xhtml lead to the chapters, while the spine in package.opf sets the file sequence. Both EPUBs specify Korean as ko. The body styles use relative font sizes and little explicit colour styling, leaving room for readers' display settings.
The first guide's chapter files contain 18 chapter headings, 133 section headings and 1,160 body paragraphs. The 18 include Chapters 1–8, the preliminary notes, preface, Appendices A–G and closing remarks. That structure divides the long manuscript into files connected through the contents page. The companion PDFs retain a page layout but lack tags that identify the heading structure, so the EPUB's heading navigation should not be assumed to work in those files.
File checks, donation and the next reading test
The production note dated 12 May 2026 records zero errors and zero warnings in EPUBCheck 5.x for the first EPUB, and zero violations in an axe-core-based check. It leaves 65 colour-contrast items for manual review because the environment could not assess them automatically. Those are historical file-check results, separate from a reader finding the right passage with their own assistive technology.
I donated both titles to the National Library for the Disabled, which issued donation certificates dated 13 May for the food and medicine guide and 15 May for the oral-health guide. They establish institutional receipt of the material, not certification of its content or accessibility.
What I would like to examine next is where people stop while looking for an item in the contents, and what remains unclear after they read a definition. Completing the books and getting them to the library leaves that next task: observing how people actually read them.