This page is an archive of changes to the knowledge base made in 2022. For the latest changes to the site, refer to the site what's new page.

Changes are listed from most recent to oldest.

August 1, 2023 — New page on remote resources

A new page covering the usability and accessibility issues that can arise from remote resource in EPUB 3 is now available.

July 28, 2023 — Linking to examples and frequently asked questions

To make it easier to reference the site, link destinations are now provided before each example in an examples section as well as before each frequently asked question. To obtain the link, click on the '§' symbol before each (also identified as permalinks in their labels).

July 19, 2023 — Updated heading and subtitle guidance

The HTML specification has finally removed all mention of the problematic outline algorithm. Part of this change is that the hgroup element has been updated to group only one heading element with its subtitles (using p tags).

This change makes the association between headings and subtitles semantically identifiable.

For more information, refer to the headings KB page.

June 15, 2023 — Updated EPUB language page

The page on setting the language in EPUB now includes more information explaining what language tags are and the mechanisms for setting and overriding languages in EPUB. The different language features are also now explained in more detail.

June 10, 2023 — Conformance changes in EPUB Accessibility 1.1

The note on the conformance identifier changes in the new standard is now an expanded subsection of the dcterms:conformsTo section. The subsection now depicts the changes in markup between 1.0 and 1.1, not just the different identifiers used.

June 8, 2023 — EPUB reading order

The knowledge base now includes a new page about defining the reading order through the EPUB spine element. The page discusses issues with the ordering documents and considerations around including non-linear content.

June 2, 2023 — New layout for categories

To make it easier to find information, the list of categories is no longer buried in a drop-down menu. The list of categories now occupies the right-hand column of the site (this position may change depending on zoom level and device screen size).

The link to the glossary is now at the bottom of the page in the Site menu, as is the link to the page that lists all topics.

May 31, 2023 — New search box

It is no longer necessary to click through to a separate search page to query the knowledge base for information. A site search box is now available in the header of every page and is reachable from the page landmarks.

April 19, 2023 — WCAG parsing requirement

The forthcoming WCAG 2.2 revision will see success criterion 4.1.1 pass for all HTML and XML-based content as it no longer captures accessibility issues that aren't already covered by other success criteria. This change will also apply retroactively to WCAG 2.0 and 2.1.

The knowledge base now reflects this new guidance, advising that parsing errors that affect accessibility be reported under their more applicable success criteria. Refer to the WCAG explain for 4.1.1 for more information.

April 17, 2023 — Evaluation metadata

Now that the EPUB Accessibility 1.1 standard has reached Proposed Recommendation status in W3C, the guidance on reporting conformance now reflects the new identifiers used in that document.

Where the EPUB Accessibility 1.0 specification used idpf.org URLs to indicate conformance, the new standard uses easier to write and understand strings. The strings also adapt to new versions of WCAG as soon as they are released.

Publishers are encouraged to begin looking at migrating to the new standard as it should become a final recommendation in the next month.

March 24, 2023 — pageBreakMarkers and pageNavigation accessibility features

The page describing the schema.org accessibilityFeature property now includes information on the pageBreakMarkers and pageNavigation values.

The pageBreakMarkers value replaces printPageNumbers as more and more publications are being created with static page locations that are not tied to a print source. The pageNavigation value enables publishers to now identify when a publication includes a page list that allows users to access the page break locations.

March 24, 2023 — pageBreakSource property

Information about the new pageBreakSource property is now available on the page navigation page. This property is currently being incubated as a replacement for using the dc:source and page-source properties.