Accessibility Metadata Display Guide 2.1 is Released

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Accessibility Metadata Display Guide 2.1 is Released

The Accessibility Task Force of the W3C Publishing Community Group has announced the release of the 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?

The 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.

The Techniques Document for 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.

Links to the Documents and Feedback

The documents are available at:

The task force welcomes 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

Our congratulations to the editors, led by DAISY’s Avneesh Singh, implementers and participants of the Accessibility Task Force for their continued work on the guide.