Updated Guidance for Displaying Accessibility Metadata
In 2021 the first User Experience Guide for Displaying Accessibility Metadata was created to provide a guide for transforming and displaying machine readable accessibility metadata to end users. This initiative aimed to develop a guidance document for retailers and distributors that prioritizes the most important accessibility metadata for users and explains how to display it in a practical and friendly way. Information was also provided to explain how to extract this metadata from different formats, and to harmonize accessibility metadata across these various formats. DAISY staff were integral to this development of this original guide, and a new updated draft version.
Updates for Version 2.0
This second version of the User Experience Guide for Accessibility Metadata has been undergoing significant changes since 1.0 was published in September 2021. The W3C Community Group identified a number of shortcomings in version 1.0 and the current draft addresses these issues, using the DAISY Accessible Publishing Knowledge Base as its authority.
First, the terminology and vocabulary used to express accessibility metadata was extremely difficult to communicate in many languages. Secondly, the machine processing of the metadata needed to be at the core of the guidelines. The first working draft of this updated version was highly anticipated particularly as preparations progress for the European Accessibility Act in 2025.
This new draft of the guidelines includes 2 sections described below.
The Principles
The section on Principles presents high level information which everybody in publishing should read. It will give publishers a better understanding of the impact that accessibility metadata has in communicating the suitability of their content to everybody. From the Principles you can also reach all other sections, giving the detail and depth required by more technical departments.
This document presents high-level principles without going into technical issues related to the different metadata standards in the publishing industry. The key accessibility information section of the principles documents covers areas such as:
- Visual adjustments
- Pre-recorded audio
- Conformance
- Non-visual reading
- Navigation
- Charts, diagrams and formulas
- Hazards
- Accessibility summary
- Legal considerations
- Additional accessibility information
Display Techniques
More in-depth and technical than the previous section Techniques is designed to give software engineers the details they need in a format they will appreciate. Detailed notes are now available to explain how to go about extracting information from metadata standards. The guidance is divided into two parts:
Giving technical examples for developers. Illustrations show how to display and retrieve data as per the sections outlined in the principles document.
Inclusions Still to Come
In the future there will also be an Implementation section which will show static pages of several companies’ implementation of the guidelines as presented to end users.
The Localization section will show all the strings that need to be localized / translated. Localization is much more than a translation because the accessibility terminology differs from one country to another. The user guide will provide a mechanism for organizations to provide their language localization for their nation. It is expected that there will be more than 30 localizations / translations by the end of the year.
Current Status of the Guidelines
The working draft was published by the Publishing Community Group. It is not a W3C Standard nor is it on the W3C Standards Track. Learn more about W3C Community and Business Groups.
Congratulations to the 4 editors of this working draft:
Charles LaPierre (Benetech), Gregorio Pellegrino (Fondazione LIA), Gautier Chomel (EDRLab ), George Kerscher (DAISY Consortium). Learn more about the work of the W3C Community and Business Groups.
Links and Resources
Inclusive Publishing metadata pages
EDItEUR ONIX guidance
LIA report published in June