Kanji

Logographic characters of Chinese origin used in the Japanese writing system alongside the two syllabic scripts, hiragana and katakana. Modern Japanese uses about 2,000-3,000 commonly-occurring kanji, but the full character set exceeds 10,000 glyphs, and historical or literary texts often include rare or archaic kanji. This has direct consequences for accessibility: OCR accuracy on Japanese text is lower than on Latin scripts; screen readers need accurate pronunciation dictionaries (or ruby annotations) to read kanji correctly; and input methods for blind users must rely on phonetic-to-kanji conversion rather than direct character entry. Accessible Japanese digital books therefore require both textual data and often pronunciation metadata.