1 September 2016 | Ted Page
The commercial drivers of accessibility metadata
Today the Digital Book World blog published a post entitled Why Discoverability Should Be Publishers’ Biggest Priority. It quite rightly sets out the advantages of a well thought-out metadata strategy for driving sales.
The author, Daniel Berkowitz, provides a list of metadata types that publishers should be supplying. These include author, title, ISBN, publisher, genre, language, and so on. Of course there are thousands of book metadata types that could be included. But one category conspicuous by its absence from the blog post’s list is accessibility metadata.
ONIX Code List 196 category types
With the appropriate use of accessibility metadata, principally in this case, ONIX Code List 196, you can inform people with disabilities that your book will be suitable for their needs. This may include information on WGAG compliance and any testing undertaken with various assistive technologies. It may also provide more specific information on the inclusion of, for example:
- accessible navigation
- an interactive index
- appropriate reading order
- long and short text descriptions for images
- accessible video
- accessible maths content
- print equivalent page numbering (page lists)
Market size
According to the World Bank and the World Health Organisation’s World Report on Disability, 2011, (PDF 10.44 MB) some 15% of the world’s population (over a billion people) have some form of disability, a figure that is expected to rise in the coming decades.
Given the size of the market, irrespective of the legal/regulatory requirements or the reputational risk drivers, can publishers really afford not to exploit the significant revenue streams that accessibility metadata offer?