Accessibility Metadata Display Guide for Digital Publications 2.1 is Released!

 

Dear Publishing Community,

 

Please feel free to circulate broadly!

 

The Accessibility Task Force of the W3C Publishing Community Group is
pleased to announce the release of 

"Accessibility Metadata Display Guide for Digital Publications 2.1." 

 

This guide helps implementers-such as bookstores, retailers, distributors,
and libraries-present machine-readable accessibility metadata in clear,
user-friendly ways, enabling users to understand whether a digital
publication meets their accessibility needs before purchase or use. While
primarily aimed at implementers, the guide is also useful for content
creators who wish to understand how their accessibility metadata is exposed
to end users.

 

What Has Changed in Version 2.1?

Guidelines Document:

The Guidelines document includes some clarifications and incremental
improvements in version 2.1, but no significant changes. The high-level
principles for displaying accessibility metadata remain stable, ensuring
continuity.

 

Techniques Documents (EPUB and ONIX):

The main updates in version 2.1 are in the EPUB and ONIX techniques
documents, which include important refinements to improve implementation
clarity and localization support.

 

A key enhancement in this release is the introduction of placeholders to
insert values from the metadata into display strings. Previous versions used
concatenation to build strings using static and dynamic components, but this
caused localization issues due to differences in sentence structure across
languages. The new approach improves flexibility in how accessibility
information is presented, makes localization easier and more accurate across
languages, for example, dates can be presented according to the local
conventions  instead of being hard coded for one region.

 

To support this change, the JSON files containing the display terms have
been updated accordingly, and the techniques documents explain how to
construct user-facing strings using the new placeholder-based model.

 

Why This Matters

*	For implementers, version 2.1 provides clearer and more robust
techniques without requiring changes to existing guideline-based user
interfaces, while significantly improving support for high-quality
localization.
*	For users, especially in non-English contexts, these changes enable
clearer, more natural presentation of accessibility information, supporting
better-informed discovery and purchasing decisions.

 

The documents are available at:

*	Guidelines:
https://www.w3.org/publishing/a11y/metadata-display-guide/guidelines/
*	EPUB Techniques:
https://www.w3.org/publishing/a11y/metadata-display-guide/techniques/epub/
*	ONIX Techniques:
https://www.w3.org/publishing/a11y/metadata-display-guide/techniques/onix/

 

We welcome localizations of the display terms to facilitate implementations
in local languages. The updated JSON files are maintained at:

https://github.com/w3c/publ-a11y-display-guide-localizations

 

Please provide your valuable feedback by opening issues in the Publishing
Community Group GitHub issue tracker:

https://github.com/w3c/publ-a11y/issues/

 

Many thanks to the editors, implementers and participants of the
Accessibility Task Force for their continued work on the guide.

 

Thank you.

Avneesh Singh

Chair of Accessibility Task Force, W3C Publishing CG

Chief Operating Officer, DAISY Consortium