Hello, everyone.

I'm Avneesh Singh.

I am responsible for leading accessibility in both EPUB 3 Working Group and Publishing Community Group.

And I am Chief of Strategy and Operations, DAISY Consortium, which is my day job.

It's great to talk to all of you again.

Today, I will be talking about what's new in accessibility in Publishing@W3C.

Let's move to slide two.

Over the last one year, we have made very good progress in two exciting initiatives.

Number one, the next revision of EPUB Accessibility specifications, which is being done in the EPUB 3 Working Group.

Number two, the user experience guide for displaying accessibility metadata, which is being done in the Publishing Community Group.

Let's move to slide three.

Let's start with EPUB Accessibility.

We are right now working on version 1.1, which is the first major increment after the first release of EPUB Accessibility specifications in year 2017.

There are many improvements, but I would like to highlight two of them.

Number one, EPUB Accessibility has been aligned with the requirements of the European Accessibility Act.

Many of you already know that if you are selling your publications in Europe, you need to comply with European Accessibility Act from June 2025 onwards.

And we know that EPUB 3 is one of the popular publishing formats used by the worldwide publishing industry.

So, we would not like the EPUB producers to do a big change to their production workflows for meeting the European Accessibility Act.

So, it is very important to align EPUB Accessibility with the European Accessibility Act.

Please do watch the presentation from Cristina Mussinelli on the European Accessibility Act for more details.

The second highlight is that EPUB Accessibility now refers to the latest revision of WCAG 2.x.

You all know that EPUB Accessibility is built on Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

In fact, the version 1.0 of EPUB Accessibility was hardwired to WCAG 2.0, which was a very stable specification from 2008 to 2018.

But after that, the Accessibility Guidelines Working Group decided to release the incremental versions of WCAG so as to cope with the evolving technologies and to incrementally incorporate more needs of users with different abilities.

And EPUB Accessibility should come along.

Isn't it?

So, the new version of EPUB Accessibility, now refers to the latest revision of WCAG 2.x.

At the same time, we provide a flexibility to refer to the earlier versions of WCAG up to version 2.0.

Not below that.

Now, this was an overview of EPUB accessibility.

Let's move to slide four to see the initiative in the Publishing Community Group.

We are working on user experience guide for displaying accessibility metadata.

Why it is so important?

We know that many of you publishers are doing great efforts in improving the accessibility of your publications.

Absolutely great job.

After the production, your publications reach the retailers and the distributors.

There, how will the user know that you have done such great efforts on accessibility?

How does your publication stand out in the crowd?

I think you already know the answer.

Great.

The answer is you should be using accessibility metadata.

But is it so straightforward?

Let's move to slide five.

A couple of years ago, one of the distributors with very good intentions, pulled out the accessibility metadata from the publications and displayed on its website.

And here is what you see.

At least I am not able to understand it.

Maybe you are, maybe some of your technical people are.

It looks like a complex code.

Isn't it?

This is because the accessibility metadata is machine readable.

It is not designed for direct human consumption.

So at that time, we realized that we need to come up with a guidance document for the retailers and the distributors.

And let's move to slide six, to see the objective of this document.

We need to provide guidance to the retailers and the distributors.

Firstly, how to interpret the accessibility metadata in the right way and then how to display it to your users in a user-friendly way.

And there is another main objective.

It is to harmonize the accessibility metadata of different metadata formats so that your users get the same accessibility information, no matter which accessibility metadata format was being used.

Please do watch the presentation from Charles and Gregorio for more details on this exciting topic.

Let's move to slide seven, our conclusion.

So my friends, this was an overview of the progress being made in accessibility in Publishing@W3C over last one year.

This is all from me for now.

I will be coming up with more updates in the future.

This Avneesh Singh signing off.

Thank you very much.