03 Accessibility Standards

This chapter summarises specific standards that enable accessibility, and is organised into four areas. First are the digital content standards that are referenced within legislation, or enable the legislation to be achieved. On a more granular level are standards relating to specific document types, that often are based on these more general or web based digital content standards and add additional requirements specific to that file type. These document type standards can include accessibility metadata embedded in the file, however there are also external metadata formats that have accessibility related fields, and both these types of accessibility metadata are described in the third section. Finally, mark up languages are crucial to tagging documents in a way that enables alternative navigation and the use of assistive technology, and these are introduced in the final section.