Accessibility metadata: A journey to understanding and implementation

This paper is based upon the OCLC presentation at the February 2025 NISO Plus conference. It describes the organization’s journey to research compliance to the European Accessibility Act (EAA). It focuses on the three major complications that shaped their approach: the tension between internal and external metadata sources, the challenge of translating between different metadata formats, and the balance between controlled vocabularies and descriptive flexibility. Their investigation began with three questions: What metadata does the EAA actually require? How will this information flow through existing supply chains? And where should accessibility data be recorded in MARC records to best serve users. OCLC’s journey unearthed a complex landscape involving questions of trust between publishers and libraries, the limitations of existing standards, and the fundamental tension between textual description and systematic discovery. They hope that sharing these experiences will help other organizations navigate similar challenges more efficiently, while contributing to the broader efforts to standardize accessibility metadata that benefit the entire community of libraries, publishers, and content aggregators.