Is my EPUB accessible?
Yes, and it's automatic. Every EPUB is built with the accessibility metadata that retailers increasingly require, and it declares what's actually true about the file rather than ticking boxes.
What your EPUB declares
- Access mode: textual — the book can be consumed entirely as text. If it has a cover, it also declares a visual mode, because the cover is the one part that isn't text.
- Text alone is sufficient — nothing in the reading experience depends on seeing an image.
- Structural navigation, a table of contents, and a defined reading order — a screen reader can move by chapter and knows what order to read things in.
- No known accessibility hazards — nothing flashing, nothing motion-triggered.
- Display transformability — the reader controls the typeface, size and spacing, and nothing in the file fights them for it.
- A plain-language summary describing all of the above in a sentence, including whether every picture in the book carries a description.
- A conformance declaration of EPUB Accessibility 1.1 — WCAG 2.2 Level AA. (2.2 rather than 2.1: the nine criteria 2.2 adds are all about interactive interfaces — focus, dragging, target size, forms — none of which a reflowable novel has.)
Alongside that, the language is declared, and the author is recorded with a proper sort form ("Le Guin, Ursula K.") so libraries and stores file the book correctly.
Why it matters now
The European Accessibility Act applies from 28 June 2025, and ebooks sold into the EU fall under it. Retailers have responded by asking publishers for accessibility metadata, and some now surface it on the product page.
Practically: a file with no accessibility metadata is increasingly one that's harder to distribute, and the metadata is not something you can add after upload without rebuilding the file.
There is a microenterprise exemption in the Act for very small businesses. That may well cover you — but the exemption is about your legal obligation, not about whether your book works for readers who use assistive technology, and the metadata costs you nothing either way.
The honest limits
Metadata says what the file claims. Validators check the claims are present and well-formed; they cannot check the claims are true. That's why the claims here are derived from what your book actually contains — a book with no cover doesn't claim a visual mode.
Two things worth knowing:
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A validated EPUB is not necessarily a good EPUB. Files with no title page and an author of "Unknown Author" pass the industry validators cleanly. Passing means well-formed, not correct — so read your file before you upload it. See How do I test the EPUB before publishing?
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Images need descriptions. If your book contains pictures, alt text is what makes them accessible, and only you can write it. The formatter takes each picture's alt text from its description in your Word file — the Edit Alt Text pane in Word — so filling that in is the whole job, and it's worth doing before you upload. A novel with no images has nothing to describe, which is why most fiction is fully accessible without any extra work.
If you haven't written a description, the picture's name is used instead — but only when it's a name you chose. Word's own auto-names (Picture 1, Image 3, a bare filename) don't count, because
alt="Picture 1"would let the book claim to be screen-reader ready on the strength of nothing. Your ebook only claims alternativeText when every picture in it genuinely has a description, and the export warns you when they don't.This matters even for decoration. A book whose scene breaks are drawn ornaments has a picture at every break; described, they announce the break, and undescribed they are silence.
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Your publisher's mark is a picture too. It is described using your imprint name, so filling that in is what makes it announce itself as "Belladrey Press" rather than going unread. If you upload a mark and give it no imprint name, it is marked as carrying no description — which is honest, and which the export will tell you about. See Can I put my publisher logo on the title page?
Checking it yourself
Two free tools, if you want to verify:
- epubcheck — the official EPUB conformance checker.
- Ace by DAISY — an accessibility checker built for EPUB specifically.