This document provides answers to commonly asked questions about the EPUB Accessibility specification and its associated techniques. It provides guidance and insight into how the document was created and the reasons for various choices in implementation.
The document is not intended as a how-to guide to creating accessible content. Please use the W3C Publishing Community Group issue tracker to ask questions about how to implement the requirements of the EPUB Accessibility specification.
Although the EPUB Accessibility specification was developed primarily for EPUB 3, it is designed to be applicable to earlier versions of the format. The requirements and techniques can be applied to make both EPUB 3-conformant and EPUB 2-conformant publications accessible.
Schema.org metadata is required in the package document because it provides a comprehensive set of descriptive metadata that fits the EPUB metadata model.
As EPUB continues to integrate with the Open Web Platform — where schema.org metadata is used by the major search engines when cataloguing information — it also represents a stable fit for future versions of the standard.
Although ONIX is critical metadata in ebook distribution channels, EPUB publications are not necessarily books nor are they all distributed through the major ebook channels. Requiring all authors of EPUB content to include an ONIX record would complicate production, potentially turning authors off from including accessibility metadata. It would also require authoring tools to be able to create and modify ONIX records, and Reading Systems to parse the records to retrieve the information. To minimize this impact on the existing ecosystem, and ensure that the metadata is always available in an easily retrievable fashion, schema.org metadata was chosen.
The choice of schema.org metadata in the package document does not diminish the need for rich accessibility metadata in ONIX records, and there is a requirement to include accessibility metadata in any distribution records that accompany an EPUB publication.
The accessibility group is looking to work with the various metadata authorities to harmonize their accessibility vocabularies as a future objective so that the same information can be encoded across formats.
If your publication only includes discoverability metadata (i.e., it does not meet the accessibility requirements and is not an optimization), it must not be promoted as accessible per this specification.
Meeting the discovery requirements allows users to determine whether the content will be usable by them, but is not in itself an achievement that they need to be made aware of.
Changing production practices is never easy, but there also needs to be a clear benchmark to meet to begin making progress. The EPUB 3 Working Group understands that the ability to meet these requirements is going to vary depending on the nature of the content produced and how it is produced.
The Working Group has also structured the specification to soften the move as much as possible, without compromising the usability of the content. The specification only requires WCAG 2.0 Level A conformance, for example, even though many regulatory frameworks require Level AA conformance for web content (publishers already have to meet the higher level in such jurisdictions). Conformance is also not mandatory for an EPUB publication to be valid, so that accessibility does not become a barrier to distribution while publishers are improving their processes.
The Working Group could not lower the threshold below WCAG conformance, as trying to pick and choose rules to follow would lead to content that is only accessible to certain audiences, and certifying who those audiences are would be a complex undertaking.
The issue with raising production quality is why the discovery metadata is so important to include. A publisher may not be able to state their content fully conforms to the specification, but if the work that has been done can be surfaced then users can make the decision for themselves about whether it will still meet their needs.
No, it leverages WCAG and includes additional requirements, but is not an official extension and should not be referred to as one.
The EPUB 3 Working Group and Web Accessibility Initiative do collaborate to integrate requirements in WCAG 2 when possible. It is anticipated that greater integration of EPUB and web accessibility requirements will occur in a future WCAG 3.
The techniques document does not duplicate the general web accessibility techniques already defined by WCAG 2. It only addresses situations where the guidance differs for publications, or where no guidance exists.
The techniques documents for both the EPUB Accessibility specification and WCAG 2 are advisory in nature. New techniques are always being developed to handle new situations. If a new technique provides the same level of accessibility, it is acceptable to use it.
The techniques do not include a checklist, as the requirement for conformance will vary from publication to publication (e.g., depending on the type of content included).
The Ace by DAISY validator is now available for machine-checking the accessibility of publications. It is accompanied by the Ace SMART tool that guides human testing and verification of WCAG conformance.
In version 1.0 of the specification, the dcterms:conformsTo property used a URL for the old International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) as the identifier for conformance.
With the IDPF having merged into W3C, it longer made sense to use a URL for the old organization. To avoid the problem of organization-specific URLs occurring again in the future, the group decided to create new identifiers that focus solely on the specification and conformance to it.
The new identifiers are equally as unique as the old URLs, so conformance statements are consistent across publications and can still be easily checked by machine (e.g., for validation, ingestion into a distribution system, etc.).
A human-readable statement about conformance should be included in the schema:accessibilitySummary property. The EPUB Accessibility specification does not require wording for such statements.
The identification of optimizations ties into the importance of discovery metadata. Content that meets accessibility requirements for specific user groups needs to be discoverable by those groups, even if the content is not considered broadly accessible (e.g., braille- and audio-optimized publications).
Identifying the third-party standard the content conforms to gives users this missing context.
Conformance to a third-party standard is indicated by including a link tag in the metadata with a URL that points to where the standard is defined.
It is recommended to include a human-readable description of conformance in the schema:accessibilitySummary property, as well.
The EPUB Accessibility specification does not endorse optimizations; it only address how to identify them in the metadata.
Any claims about the accessibility of an optimization must not make reference to the EPUB Accessibility specification. Such a claim should identify the standard the publication conforms to and the organization that created that standard.
The EPUB 3 Working Group maintains a guide of known optimization standards to help facilitate lookup of their identifiers.
This list is provided solely for informational purposes.