Accessible ebooks, and why they are now everyone's problem
For years, making an ebook accessible was something large publishers talked about and independent authors skipped. That has changed, and not gently.
The European Accessibility Act covers ebooks sold into the European Union and applied from 2025. Exactly who it obliges depends on the size of the business and the country, so check your own position rather than assuming you are too small to be covered — and note that it is the retailers, not the regulators, most authors will hear from first. Meanwhile retailers have started asking every publisher, at every size, for accessibility metadata — a declaration of what your file supports — and displaying the answer on the book's page.
So the question is no longer whether you care about accessibility. It is whether your file can say what it does.
What an accessible EPUB actually is
Strip the standards language away and it comes down to seven things, none of which are difficult if the book was built properly.
A declared language. One line of metadata that tells software what language the book is in. It decides how a screen reader pronounces every word. Without it the reader guesses, and a guess that lands on the wrong language turns your novel into noise.
Real headings, in a real order. This is the one authors underestimate. A blind reader does not scroll looking for the next chapter; they jump from heading to heading, the way you would flick pages with your thumb. A chapter title that is only big bold text is not a heading — it is a paragraph wearing a costume, and to that reader it does not exist. The order matters too: a top-level heading followed by a third-level one leaves a hole in the map.
Alt text on meaningful images. A short description of what the image conveys, not what it is called. "Map of the northern coast, with the three ports marked" tells a reader something. "map.jpg" or "Image 4" tells them nothing. An image that conveys nothing — a rule, a flourish, a decorative frame — should be marked as decorative so it is skipped silently rather than announced.
A reading order that matches the visual order. What a screen reader reads aloud, top to bottom, should be what a sighted reader sees, top to bottom. Files where a caption arrives three paragraphs before its figure, or a pull quote interrupts a sentence, are technically valid and practically unreadable.
Text that can be resized without breaking. A reader with low vision will push the type up to a size you would find absurd, and the book has to reflow and survive it. The consequence for you is simple: no text baked into images. A chapter heading saved as a picture cannot be resized, cannot be read aloud, cannot be searched, and cannot be selected.
Enough contrast, and never color alone. Light gray text on white fails for a lot of people who do not consider themselves visually impaired. And if a colored word is the only thing marking a character's dialogue or a change of viewpoint, that meaning disappears for a reader who cannot distinguish the color, is reading on a monochrome e-ink screen, or is listening. Carry the meaning in the words or the structure, and let color reinforce it.
Accessibility metadata. A statement inside the file of what it supports — readable text, working navigation, how images are handled, any known shortcomings. Stores read it and show it. A file that supports everything but declares nothing looks, in a catalog, exactly like a file that supports nothing.
In the tools. The Interior Formatter builds an EPUB 3 with a declared language, accessibility metadata, ARIA roles and proper chapter numbering already set, and carries the alt text from your manuscript into the file. Start a book → · about the tools
What it rules out
Three habits fail this outright, and all three are common.
A scanned page as a "page". An image of a page is not text. It cannot be read aloud, resized, searched or reflowed. A book made of page images is, to assistive technology, a book with no words in it.
A fixed-layout file for a novel. Fixed layout pins everything to a coordinate on a fixed canvas. That is the right choice for a picture book or a comic, where position carries meaning. For prose it takes away reflow, which is the single feature a low-vision reader depends on most.
A hand-built table of contents. A page of styled links you typed yourself is not navigation. It looks like navigation to you and is invisible to the navigation control in every reading app. The contents have to be generated from the book's real structure, or they are decoration.
This is the same work as making a good book
Here is the part worth holding on to: nothing above is accessibility work. It is structure work.
Headings marked as headings, images described, reading order honest, text as text, contents generated from the chapters that actually exist — that is the same list that makes a book typeset cleanly, convert reliably and pass validation. A book built that way is most of the way to accessible before anyone uses the word. A book held together by manual formatting fails all of it at once.
And the audience is not small. It includes readers with low vision, readers with dyslexia who need to change the typeface and the spacing, readers with a tremor who cannot hold a print book steady, and the very large number of people who listen to books through text-to-speech while doing something else. None of them are a niche you are being generous toward. They are readers who can either buy your book or cannot.
In the tools. The same manuscript produces your print PDF and a Large Print edition at 6 x 9 in 16 pt Luciole, a typeface drawn for low-vision readers — so the accessible version is another export, not another project. Start a book → · about the tools
Make yours
Everything here is built into the tools, and they are free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript or your artwork, and work as long as you like. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
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