Accessibility metadata display guide for digital publications 2.0 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 2.0".

 

introduction:

The publishing industry has been making considerable efforts to make the
publications accessible. But how can your users search and identify
accessible publications? Let's consider that the person is blind and relies
on assistive technology. The user needs that technology to assist them in
the purchase process as well as to read the publication. The person may
wonder: will the screen reader work with this title; are there image
descriptions that will be spoken; are there page numbers which are
accessible; is the reading order correct so a caution after reading a
paragraph which could be dangerous will be announced?

 

This guide helps those who wish to render accessibility metadata directly to
users in understanding how to represent the accessibility claims inherent in
machine-readable accessibility metadata in a user-friendly User Interface /
User Experience. This document is for the implementers such as bookstores,
retailers, distributors etc. Content creators will also benefit from reading
these guidelines.

 

The guide currently consists of a guidelines document and two techniques
document - one for EPUB package metadata and one for ONIX records. Technique
documents to cover other metadata formats are also under discussion.

The guidelines document presents high-level principles without going into
technical issues related to the different metadata standards in the
publishing industry.

The techniques documents illustrate to developers how to retrieve data to
show the information outlined in the principles.

 

The documents are at:

- Guidelines:
<https://www.w3.org/publishing/a11y/metadata-display-guide/guidelines/>
https://www.w3.org/publishing/a11y/metadata-display-guide/guidelines/

- EPUB Techniques:
<https://www.w3.org/publishing/a11y/metadata-display-guide/techniques/epub/>
https://www.w3.org/publishing/a11y/metadata-display-guide/techniques/epub/

- ONIX Techniques:
<https://www.w3.org/publishing/a11y/metadata-display-guide/techniques/onix/>
https://www.w3.org/publishing/a11y/metadata-display-guide/techniques/onix/

 

We welcome localizations of the terms for facilitating the implementations
in the local languages. The JSON files of localizations are maintained at:

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

 

Many thanks to the editors and participants of the accessibility task force
for massive refinements done on the guide.

 

Please provide your valuable feedback by opening issues in the following
GitHub issue tracker:

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

 

Thank you

Avneesh Singh

Chair of Accessibility task force, W3C Publishing CG

Chief Operating Officer, DAISY Consortium