Accessibility Resources

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BIC Brunch Accessibility Series:

Dedicated to accessibility, this series of BIC Brunches (which launched in July 2024) will over the course of several months, address the following topics: 

More sessions to come…

Diagram of an EPUB file 

Kindly provided by James Yanchak, (Production Technologies Manager, Taylor & Francis) this diagram is intended to help show and explain the complexities of the EPUB file. 

PAAG Resources page:

The Publishing Accessibility Action Group (PAAG) resources area is packed full of information relating to a variety of topics including (but not limited to) Alt Text, Testing, Regulations, Complex Content and more: https://www.paag.uk/paag-resources/

Outputs from the W3C Working Group

What Has Changed in Version 2.1?

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.

Techniques Documents (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.

Process for providing feedback and asking questions:

If after having read the above guidelines, you have questions for the W3C community that relate to the documents, please open an issue in GitHub repository at: https://github.com/w3c/publ-a11y/issues/

For straight forward questions, the members of task force will respond to the questions in the issue tracker itself. If they feel that the issue needs discussion, then they will schedule the discussion in one of our meetings.

Even if you do not have feedback at this time, it is important to know that you are interested in implementing these guides. Please comment in the following issue to show your interest and provide your name, email address, and company/organization in the comment. It will help in keeping you updated as we make more progress.
https://github.com/w3c/publ-a11y/issues/268

Validation Tools

Guidelines for font size

Not all fonts are created accessible. Find out more information on accessible fonts with hints and tips for implementing them: https://adasitecompliance.com/accessible-fonts/

ONIX is able to share data with regards to font and font size. This is done using the same composite that is used for accessibility information, <ProductFormFeature> and code 03 from ONIX code list 79:

https://ns.editeur.org/onix/en/79/03

You would include the typeface name in <ProductFormFeatureDescription> and the size, in points, in <ProductFormFeatureValue>. There is an example of this in the ONIX documentation cited in the ONIX subpage.

Reading List