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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.
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Save the Date: DAISY Technical Meetings in Oslo, June 2026

The DAISY Consortium Board will meet in Oslo in June 2026, hosted by the Norwegian National Library. Technical meetings and workshops will take place on June 11-12, providing opportunities for collaboration and knowledge exchange among members. Mark your calendars now to join us in Norway for this important gathering of the DAISY community.

The latest event information can be found on the event web page: https://www.nb.no/DAISYconference2026/

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ABC International Excellence Awards 2026: Call For Nominations

Nominations are now open for the 2026 ABC International Excellence Awards for Accessible Publishing.  The presentation of the awards will take place at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair, reflecting ABC’s commitment to inspiring children’s book publishers to make their titles accessible to all young readers.

As in previous years, there are two categories for the awards, allowing both publishers and other initiatives to be celebrated for their work progressing accessibility in their respective fields.

Selection Criteria

The selection panel, comprising experts in the field of accessibility, will evaluate nominations based on the following criteria:

  • a commitment to making content available in accessible formats;
  • accessibility standards built into production systems to make books accessible on, or close to, publication date;
  • collaboration with partners in the supply chain to ensure that accessibility is maintained in delivering the product to the print disabled end-user;
  • innovative practices established to advance the accessibility of e-books and digital publications;
  • widespread positive impact on persons who are blind, visually impaired or otherwise print-disabled; and
  • an overall commitment to ABC’s mission of making content globally available in accessible formats.

Nominations for the publisher and project initiative categories should be submitted by Monday, February 2, 2026.

The ABC Awards Announcement contains all the relevant information including the nomination form and details of the process.

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Congratulations to ABC Excellence Awards Winners 2025

Many congratulations to the winners of the Accessible Books Consortium International Excellence Awards for Accessible Publishing, announced yesterday during the gala dinner of the World Blindness Summit in São Paulo, Brazil.

The awards are divided into 2 categories with an impressive set of finalists for each.

Publishing Award Winner: DADO Editorial Sensorial

Columbian publisher DADO Editorial Sensorial was honored in the publisher category for its work in developing a wide range of accessible reading formats in Colombia. In addition to braille, digital books, and audiobooks, DADO Editorial Sensorial has introduced tactile elements to its books.also.

Congratulations also go to the other finalists in this category:

Initiative Award Winner: APACE Project

The Accelerating Publishing Accessibility through Collaboration in Europe Project (APACE), was coordinated by Fondazione LIA in Italy and brings together Publishers’ Associations from Italy, Germany, and Bulgaria with three libraries for the blind: Dedicon in the Netherlands, Accessibility Library Celia in Finland, and the Lithuanian Audiosensory Library. The jury in particular praised APACE’s collaborative model of seven partners in both the publishing and library sectors, located across six countries. Through training, resources, and cross-border cooperation, the project aims to equip organizations to embed accessibility in their day-to-day practices.

Congratulations also go to the other finalists in this category:

Nominees were judged on the criteria of outstanding leadership or achievements in improving the accessibility of ebooks or other digital publications for persons who are print disabled. The full press release from ABC provides further information.

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Shortlist Announced for ABC International Excellence Awards 2025

The short-list for the 2025 ABC International Excellence Awards in Accessible Publishing has been announced in advance of the awards ceremony to be held at the World Blindness Summit in September, 2025.  There are two categories of awards, publishers and initiatives, and the following shortlisted candidates were selected from nominations from around the globe:

Publishers

Initiatives

A jury made up of representatives from publishers, organizations working in the field of accessibility, and organizations representing persons who are visually impaired, is charged each year with the difficult task of choosing finalists and selecting winners. Congratulations to all those shortlisted!

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DAISY Members on Forbes Accessibility 100

This week Forbes released their first ever Accessibility 100, highlighting and celebrating the work of 100 organizations conducting significant work in the sector.

We’re delighted to report that several DAISY member organizations were recognized on the list:

  • Benetech
  • Google
  • Humanware
  • Microsoft

Many congratulations to the organizations and individuals concerned.

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Avneesh Re-Elected to W3C Advisory Board 2025

Many congratulations to Avneesh Singh, Chief Operating Officer at The DAISY Consortium, who has been re-elected to the W3C Advisory Board, as reported in W3C’s announcement.

The W3C Advisory Board  “provides ongoing guidance on issues of strategy, management, legal matters, process, and conflict resolution” within the W3C. DAISY is delighted that the board will continue to have the benefit of Avneesh’s experience and expertise.

Avneesh commented: “I am delighted to see such wonderful support from W3C community, enabling me to continue my contributions to the crucial work that the advisory board has been doing, especially on the vision and strategy for preparing W3C for the future, furthering the W3C into a mission-oriented and community driven organization, on improving diversity and inclusion and on social values (accessibility, internationalization, privacy, security and sustainability). Thanks to everyone for your enthusiastic support. I am looking forward to interacting with all of you in the near future.”

Special thanks for the continuous support and confidence of the DAISY Community, DAISY board and DAISY staff, who are highly committed to the development and worldwide implementation of accessibility, open standards and inclusive technologies, working from the grass root level up to the governance of standards bodies.

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Obi 5.1 Released

DAISY Consortium is pleased to announce the latest release of Obi, the popular open-source navigable audio book creation tool. Obi produces books conforming to the DAISY 3, DAISY 2.02, W3C Audio Books and accessible EPUB 3 specifications.

Obi 5.1 comes with enhanced functionality by using artificial intelligence (AI), incremental features and bug fixes. The synthetic speech generation has been enhanced by introduction of high-quality Azure AI voices from Microsoft, noise reduction has been enhanced by using AI models, performance is improved for phrase navigation along with other improvements and bug fixes.

Please visit the Obi project area to check out the full list of features and bug fixes, or Download Obi Version 5.1.

The DAISY Consortium would like to extend a special “thank you” to all contributors and supporters for their valuable feedback and support.

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Accessibility Metadata Display Guide for Digital Publications 2.0 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 2.0. After more than 2 years work by this expert team, we are delighted to share this news with our readers. DAISY staff members have been integral to the development of this updated guidance which helps those who wish to render accessibility metadata directly to users.

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. It 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.

Guidance Documents

The documents can be accessed at:

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

Additional Resources

Previous articles and information on the new guidance include:

Our congratulations to the editors and participants of the accessibility task force for these impressive updates and refinements.

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Nominations Open – International Excellence Awards for Accessible Publishing 2025

Nominations are now open for the WIPO Accessible Books Consortium International Excellence Awards 2025. As in previous years, there are two categories for the awards, allowing both publishers and other initiatives to be celebrated for their work progressing accessibility in their respective fields.

Nominations are open until July 14th, and the winners will be announced during a ceremony in September at the World Blindness Summit in Brazil.

The ABC Awards Announcement contains all the relevant information including the nomination form and details of the process.

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