03 Accessibility Standards

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