Schema.org Adopts Accessibility Metadata Project Proposal

The short blog post from Schema.org this month means potentially large impact on our future ability to find accessible materials on the Web. We here at Benetech could not be happier to report that Schema.org, a consortium of the major search engines including Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex have accepted the working group’s proposal for a key set of accessibility metadata tagging that could allow anyone with access to the Internet to more easily locate materials with accessible features, such as image descriptions, video captioning, and more. From the announcement on schema.org, “This work draws upon many collaborations and projects including the IMS Global Learning Consortium’s Access For All specification (http://www.imsglobal.org/accessibility/), the work of the Accessibility Metadata Project (http://www.a11ymetadata.org/), alongside many discussions that helped ensure the work integrated well into schema.org.” As Gerardo Capiel says in his recent blog post about the Accessibility Metadata Project, “This is a tremendous milestone in the collaborative journey towards enabling a born accessible future and reaping its benefits.”