Publishers aren’t anywhere near as ready for the European Union’s Accessibility Act as they need to be, and even awareness of the Act is far from ideal. That’s the finding from the latest report of Apace, the group set up to keep on top of the industry’s progress toward producing more accessible books.
ALLi News Editor, Dan Holloway
From June 2025, all publishers who want their ebooks to be available in the European Union will need to make them accessible according to the requirements set out under the European Accessibility Act. That, of course, includes us as indies.
Key Requirements to the Accessibility Act
Key requirements include the need to ensure assistive technology can fully access and use your ebooks; the ability to change font and font size according to need; requirements around navigability, such as clear layout of contents and ensuring links are clearly defined; and “stability,” meaning that people can keep accessing a file over a prolonged period.
The latest finding from Apace, the group set up to help publishers get ready for the deadline, is that while 70 percent of publishers are aware of the Act’s requirements (personally, I find this astonishingly low), fewer than 40 percent are on course to be ready.
Quick Overview of the Accessibility Act
I expect to cover this story quite regularly as everyone gears up for this. Meanwhile, here’s a quick overview of a few key points for indies to help ensure we’re ready.
- Amazon’s KDP has some accessibility guidelines, which are helpful but aren’t by any means exhaustive for what will be needed. For a deeper dive, consult W3C, the group responsible for internet openness that produces the official Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
- Some platforms, such as StreetLib, will help you produce your ebooks in ready-to-go formats.
- Digital Rights Management is likely to cause problems because it can stop people from using the assistive technology they need.
- As you might expect (as I have been saying in this column for years), EPUB is the best format for ebook accessibility, far outstripping PDF.
