The Accessibility task force of the W3C Publishing Community Group has announced the release of “Accessibility metadata display guide for digital publications 2.0”.

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.

Gregorio Pellegrino, LIA’s Chief Accessibility Officer and co-editor of the document explains: it is a significant milestone in our efforts to make ebooks accessible to all readers, as they offer valuable guidance on how to present ebook accessibility information clearly and consistently across different distribution channels (such as online bookstores, platforms, and reading apps) to the end users.

An important additional added value is the publication of an official list of the sentences to be shown to end users. These sentences translate in a user-friendly way all the accessibility metadata information available in ONIX, thus enabling all readers (regardless of their technical knowledge) to quickly be informed of the accessibility features of an ebook and understand if it meets their specific needs.

The list of sentences is available in different languages: Fondazione LIA has taken care of the Italian translation.

LIA Catalogue is one of the first to implement them

The Publishing Community Group showcases various implementations of these guidelines from organizations sharing their display of accessibility metadata.

The LIA Catalogue is one of the very first to display accessibility metadata on its bookshelf following the approach proposed by these guidelines. The Catalogue, developed by Fondazione LIA, collects over 38,000 certified accessible ebooks from 80+ publishing brands and since its first publication had included accessibility metadata for each book. Now, the previous metadata has been replaced with new ones aligned with the W3C guidelines.

Furthermore, to make them even clearer for end users, LIA has adopted a special graphic layout enhanced with icons representing each category of metadata; as in this page: catalogo.fondazionelia.org/content/love-first-fight-ti-sfido-ad-amarmi-9788835741930. LIA is happy to freely grant their use to other organizations. If you are interested, please contact: segreteria@fondazionelia.org.

To foster the broader adoption of these guidelines, LIA is now supporting publishers, online bookstores, and aggregators in implementing them across their online stores and platforms.

The documents

The guide currently consists of:

• a guidelines document: it presents high-level principles without going into technical issues related to the different metadata standards in the publishing industry;
• two techniques documents (one for EPUB package metadata and one for ONIX records). They illustrate to developers how to retrieve data to show the information outlined in the principles.

The documents are available at the following URL:

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

You can provide your feedback by opening issues in the following GitHub issue tracker: github.com/w3c/publ-a11y/issues/