Accessibility Metadata Display Guide for Digital Publications

Implementation Report

Introduction

Implementations

Catalogo LIA

Web site: http://www.libriitalianiaccessibili.it/

Organization: Fondazione LIA

The LIA Catalogue is a website that presents all accessible ebooks certified by Fondazione LIA. Developed following accessibility paradigm, the LIA Catalog is independently navigable by everyone, including those who use assistive technologies to browse the catalog of accessible ebooks, search by genre, author, or title, select titles of interest, view the book detail page, and read about an ebook's accessibility features.

The LIA catalog brings together more than 38,000 ebooks from over 76 publishing brands.

The implementation of the display of accessibility metadata is based on the guidelines defined in the W3C. The Italian localization of the text labels was carried out by Fondazione LIA.

The graphic layout and the icons used in the presentation of accessibility metadata were designed by Fondazione LIA, which can grant their use to third parties. If interested, you may contact Fondazione LIA by email (segreteria@fondazionelia.org).

screeshot of Fondazione LIA implementation: the texts are in Italian, the main title is «accessibility features», the sub-sections are «certification», «navigation», «reading modes» (with subsections «Customization of graphical aspects» and «Additional features») and «Content enrichment». Each section has the texts as suggested by the guidelines. Each section is accompanied by an icon.
Accessibility features' box is shown on the detail page of each ebook

DAISY Accessibility Metadata Viewer

Web site: https://daisy.github.io/a11y-meta-viewer/

Organization: DAISY Consortium

The DAISY Accessibility Metadata Viewer is a free browser-based testing tool that allows users to review the metadata that will be generated according to the display guidelines and techniques. It can run online or downloaded and run locally.

To use the tool, a user only needs to paste an EPUB package document or ONIX record into the user interface. The viewer has options to display either the descriptive or compact display statements, as well as to select the display language and suppress fields for which no information is available.

The site provides some free sample records for testing purposes for users who not have access to digital publication metadata.

DAISY Accessibility Metadata Viewer result dialog
The result dialog for the DAISY Accessibility Metadata Viewer has options at the top to control the display of the metadata. The metadata headings are laid out in a tabular format with their corresponding display statements to their right.

Readium Mobile

Web site: https://readium.org/mobile/

Organization: Readium Foundation

Readium Mobile is an open source toolkit for ebooks, audiobooks and comics written in Swift & Kotlin with 60+ applications.

The implementation is as complete as possible, offering the flexibility to choose between compact or descriptive statements. It will be displayed in the bookshelf as well as in the catalog view (OPDS). A dedicated documentation section is provided.

At this moment, the certified information is not available because of a placeholders localization issue that has to be addressed by the working group.

Readium Mobile test app screenshot
TThe book information panel contains Title, Identifier, Author, Publisher and Publication Date. After a separator, the section titled "Accessibility Claims" begins. The first toggle button allows to hide or show fields with no metadata, a second button allows to use descriptive instead of compact statements. Then the list of accessibility information is visible, starting with Ways of reading, followed by Navigation, Additional accessibility information, Hazards and Conformance.

Thorium Desktop

Web site: https://thorium.edrlab.org

Organization: European Digital Reading Lab (edrlab)

Thorium Desktop (formerly Thorium Reader) is a reading application available for MacOS, Windows and Linux.

The implementation focus on Ways of Reading and Navigation information that are always shown. All other information are available on user action thru a "More Information" toggle button.

Complementary accessibility information on Thorium usage is available on the dedicated accessibility section of the support webpage.

Thorium Desktop is open source and therefore can be forked, meaning that this same behavior can appear in other applications based on Thorium code.

At this moment, the date of certification information is not available because of a placeholders localization issue that has to be addressed by the working group.

Thorium Desktop book information panel screenshot
The book information panel shows two titles: Publication details and Accessibility. The accessibility section is composed of the always shown titles Ways of Reading and Navigation. Then a "More Information" toggle button can include other accessibility information if they are available. The compact sentences are displayed and the descriptive ones are available as title of the line element, visually marked by a question mark pictogram.