Publishing@W3C: September 2021 Seminar

Hello, my name is Charles LaPierre, I'm the Technical Lead for the DIAGRAM Center and Born Accessible initiative at Benetech, a nonprofit company.

Hi, I'm Gregorio Pellegrino from Fondazione LIA, an Italian not-for-profit organization focused on digital content accessibility.

And we are here for telling you something about accessibility metadata in the field of digital publications.

So we can switch to slide two, the overview.

In this video we are going to present the state-of-the-art in the area of accessibility metadata for digital publications.

We start from what problems we would like to solve, trying to look at the situation from the point of view of people with visual impairments.

We will then move in the exploration of the document user experience guide for accessibility metadata, analyzing the principles and the techniques.

And finally, we will try to show a perspective of the future work ahead in the field of metadata for accessibility of digital publications.

At the end of the presentation, on slide 9 and 10, you will find links to all the documents mentioned.

Slide three, initial goal, problem to solve.

Finding, buying, and finally reading a book is a very personal experience.

For most of us this is routine, where we go to a bookstore, search for the title that we're interested in, or perhaps browse the bestseller list, then purchase and start reading the book.

Now consider you're blind and rely on assistive technologies to read this book.

Will my screen reader work with this title?

" Are there image descriptions describing these images?" Are there page numbers which are accessible?

" Is the reading order correct, so I don't hear chapter four before chapter three?" These are just a few of the accessibility concerns consumers have when trying to purchase and, ultimately, read these electronic publications. The good news is more and more publishers are creating born accessible publications and getting the accessibility validation, or audit, done by independent organizations. These accessible publications need to be easily found, and there needs to be a consistent way to expose this technical metadata in a user-friendly way.

Slide four, principles. Me and Charles are the editor of the User Experience Guidelines for Accessibility Metadata, and we decided to divide the documents into two parts, on the one hand, the principles, which are independent from the metadata standards used, and on the other hand, the techniques that explain to developers how to extract the information from different standards and display it to end users. Usually this metadata is in machine-readable formats that only insiders can understand. So in the documents, we explain how to present the information in a user-friendly way. The goal is for digital publication catalogs, like libraries and online bookstores, to be able to present accessibility information in a way that can be understood by everyone.

Slide five, key information. Ordering this information in a meaningful and consistent way is key, so that the most important information appears first to help the user quickly determine if this publication will meet their specific needs. The two most important accessibility accommodations are if the publication is screen reader friendly, which implies all text in this book is accessible, and any images, if present, are described. Secondly, if this publication has full audio. The next important piece is the accessibility summary, which is the metadata describing all the accessibility accommodations provided by this publication. Following this are the accessibility conformance statements, what level, who certified it, their certification credentials, if any, et cetera. Finally, displaying any hazards, if present, and linking to all the accessibility metadata, including the specific accessibility features, such as their image descriptions, MathML, table of contents, et cetera.

Slide six, user interface discovery for libraries and bookstores. Here is a screenshot of a mock accessibility page showing this information in order of importance. At the top, we have screen reader friendly, the accessibility summary, EPUB accessibility, and WCAG AA conformance, certified by AMCE with their credential showing a shield with a check mark, followed by all of the accessibility metadata, including any features, hazards, access modes, et cetera.

Slide seven, techniques for metadata. As mentioned before the general principles can be adapted to different standards for metadata for accessible publications. Thus, we thought to offer useful documents for developers with code examples explaining how to extract information from metadata, and present it according to the principles. For now, we have techniques for EPUB metadata in Schema.org and for ONIX, but we would like to increase the list of technical documentation soon. We started with these two, because in the world of digital publications, and EPUBs, in particular, these are the two ways to describe accessibility, both of which are important for different use cases. Metadata within the digital publication, as Schema.org and EPUB metadata, is useful for all systems that receive the EPUB files and do the ingestion before making it available on their platforms, but also for reading applications that have the files available. Instead, metadata along the supply chain in ONIX is good for all the cases of catalogs that present collections of digital publications without having actually the file available, like digital libraries, online bookstores, et cetera.

Slide eight, future work. Not all the accessibility metadata that can exist inside the EPUB is available in ONIX, or other metadata standards, such as MARC which is used for libraries, and JATS used for journal articles. Harmonization between these different metadata standards is work that has started already with new accessibility features being added to ONIX 3.1, and future work to be done as we continue to support these metadata standards in the ecosystem. In parallel to the work being done in ONIX, the next standard, which looks promising, is MARC 21, as libraries are looking to also provide this accessibility information to their customers.

Slides 9 and 10 have resources available to you if you're looking for more information on all of the accessibility metadata, the code list for ONIX, the Crosswalk, the GitHub repos, as well as the principle document and techniques for ONIX and the accessibility metadata itself. So thank you very much, appreciate your time. Thank you, bye.