Abstract:

The large-scale adoption of digital textbooks presents significant challenges for publishers, particularly when accessibility, multimedia, and interactive learning experiences must be supported simultaneously. In Brazil, the National Textbook and Teaching Materials Program (Programa Nacional do Livro e do Material Didático – PNLD) serves more than 40 million students in public schools. Within the PNLD Digital initiative, digital textbooks must support rich interactivity while remaining fully accessible and compatible with diverse devices and connectivity conditions.

To meet these requirements, Web Publications have been established as the official format for PNLD digital textbooks, enabling educational resources to leverage the full web technology stack (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and multimedia) while maintaining strong accessibility guarantees aligned with international standards. However, producing such technically complex publications represents a major challenge for publishers, whose production workflows remain largely centered on print-first and PDF-based processes.

This paper presents a scalable production workflow for accessible and interactive Web Publications in the PNLD ecosystem, based on the customization and integration of UNICEF’s open-source ADT Press toolset. The proposed approach enables the automated transformation of existing PDF textbooks into interactive Web Publications enriched with multimedia and dynamic content. Key innovations include AI-assisted generation of publication structures compatible with the PNLD Web Publications specification, automated conversion pipelines, and integration with the PNLD Interactive Reader (LIP), an offline-first desktop and mobile reading environment used as a validation and testing platform.

The main contribution of this work is the demonstration of a practical, cost-efficient workflow that bridges traditional textbook production processes with modern web-based publishing standards required by national digital education programs. Preliminary results show substantial reductions in production time and costs, while enabling the scalable deployment of accessible and interactive digital textbooks across Brazil’s PNLD infrastructure. These results highlight the potential of combining AI-assisted publishing workflows, open-source tooling, and web standards to accelerate the large-scale production of inclusive digital learning resources.

Keywords:

Interactive Digital Textbooks, Web Publications, Accessible Educational Resources, AI-Assisted Publishing Workflows, Digital Textbook Production.