Major Accessibility Legislation is Coming: What You Need to Know

A big piece of European Union (EU) legislation is coming and is set to have a dramatic impact on the marketplace, and even on how North American publishers operate. In much the same way that EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has us thinking about cookies whenever we visit a website, the forward-thinking European legislation is bound to cause commerce ripples around the world.

The European Accessibility Act (EAA) was approved in 2019, and due to go into full force in June 2025. It is officially a directive — which means that it sets binding accessibility goals but leaves it to member states to make decisions about implementation. The stated goal is to eliminate and prevent barriers to free movement of products and services across member states, thereby strengthening the rights of persons with disabilities to access goods and services.

The act governs a number of products and services but the most relevant here are:

• consumer computer hardware systems (personal computers, notebooks, smartphones, and tablets) and operating systems
• self-service terminals (payment or ticketing terminals)
• consumer banking services
• electronic communication services
• payment services
• services to access audio-visual media services — which includes ebooks, dedicated reading software, e-reading devices, and e-commerce

Ebooks and software e-reading solutions are considered services. This means that the concept of a service provider includes publishers and all others involved in their distribution in the following areas:

• Distributors and online retailers, e-commerce websites and mobile apps, online platforms
• Software e-reading solutions
• Digital rights management (DRM) solutions
• Metadata

For both products and services, the EAA provides for mandatory compliance and ability to certify conformity via the CE marking (Conformité Européenne). The EAA foresees the presence of market surveillance authorities, both at the European and the national level, responsible for checking the compliance of products and services with EAA requirements.

There will be exemptions for microenterprises — that is, those companies that have ten or fewer employees, or an annual balance sheet not exceeding 2 million euros. Reporting on the state of a company’s compliance is required and will be required every five years. Neither a lack of priority, a lack of time, nor a lack of knowledge will be considered permissible excuses. While implementation at the national level is up to the legislatures in those countries, the EAA states explicitly that penalties should be effective, proportionate, and dissuasive.

What does all this really mean?

If you want to export ebooks to the EU market, you need to pay attention to the standards and meet or exceed them. If you want to sell content via a website to the enormous EU marketplace, you need to figure out what WCAG stands for (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) and how to implement it on your digital presence. If you have a reading app that you hope will be used anywhere in Europe, you will want to mind your Ps and Qs.

This legislation is poised to have a seismic effect on digital publishing by influencing both emerging and developed markets. Creating accessibility-compliant digital publications to sell or distribute in the EU helps lay the foundation for born-accessible ebooks that can be sold to other markets. It invariably helps refine the quality of content and provides access to a larger audience.

The EAA mandates that accessibility should be achieved by the systematic removal and prevention of barriers through a universal design approach. Born-accessible content ensures that access for disabled people is prioritized on an equal basis in the marketplace. Following inclusive design principles means that we are creating content that is better for all readers.

The legislation doesn’t specify formats but some general guidelines for EPUB include the following:

• Navigation via the table of contents (TOC) and the text using the titles to understand the general structure and hierarchy
• Print-corollary page list
• Robust HTML
• Read and navigate the tables
• Understand the content of images, graphics, and photos thanks to the alternative description of the images

If publishing in the PDF format, content should be tagged and optimized for screen readers, including:

• Searchable text file, not a scan of pages in image format
• Structure of the document must be identified by tags
• Reading order must be clear, logical, and easy to follow
• Every non-textual element in the document must have an alternate description

Content that is certified accessible by specialists might provide a level of quality control and help contribute to the next important part of meeting the requirements of EAA: describing it accurately for the market. Accessibility metadata is a powerful way to describe the accessibility of your content and to help readers find what they need.

There are three kinds of accessibility metadata that this rubric covers:

• schema.org metadata, i.e., the descriptors inside an EPUB
• ONIX metadata, that is the XML file of data that travels alongside an ebook into the market and which includes all the detail about a book. Codelist 196 details all the possible values.
• Conformance metadata detailing certification details

If a publisher has done the work to create certified accessible content, then that content must be adequately described for the marketplace. The EAA requires retailers to display accessibility information on their website, which means that distributors and aggregators who sell into the EU must be ready to adapt their repositories and backends to receive accessibility metadata so that at the next stage of the supply-chain pipeline, digital bookstores will be able to display detailed accessibility metadata. This means displaying information on the accessibility features of each file in the catalogue and, if possible, setting a search filter that allows for the creation of a specific section of all the accessible titles available or to filter only accessible ones. See this book on Vital Source for an example of what that looks like:

The accessibility metadata for Out of the Sun

It’s Time

Every single part of the ebook supply chain is strongly encouraged to start adapting its workflows, to acquire the required technical knowledge, and to embrace the culture of accessibility. We need to create an accessible publishing ecosystem to ensure that all areas of our digital workflow, from content creation through to paying for ebooks online and the accessibility of our reading apps, are fully accessible. Every participant in this workflow needs to play their part in complying with the requirements of the EAA.

The importance of accessible content and commerce to the EU marketplace cannot be overstated. It’s time to get your house in order.

What is Universal Design?

Thinking inclusively means designing products and environments to be usable by all people to the greatest extent possible without the need for adaptation or specialized design. There is a vast difference between bolted-on accessibility and from-the-start inclusive design. I hope this picture of a steep staircase next to an equally steep and utterly unusable wheelchair ramp helps to demonstrate the problem.

Specific Requirements for Ebooks

Here is the text in the EAA regarding ebooks.

The provision of services in order to maximise their foreseeable use by persons with disabilities, shall be achieved by including functions, practices, policies and procedures and alterations in the operation of the service targeted to address the needs of persons with disabilities and ensure interoperability with assistive technologies:

…

f) E-books:

1. ensuring that, when an e-book contains audio in addition to text, it then provides synchronised text and audio; => no requirement of synchronization for e-books which don’t contain audio files
2. ensuring that e-book digital files do not prevent assistive technology from operating properly; => the format and the structure of the ebook must allow the functioning of any assistive technology (example in Annex II, Section IV [f]: enabling a text output or a Braille transcript)
3. ensuring access to the content, the navigation of the file content and layout including dynamic layout, the provision of the structure, flexibility and choice in the presentation of the content; => make sure a Blind person can access the table of content or move to another chapter
4. allowing alternative renditions of the content and its interoperability with a variety of assistive technologies, in such a way that it is perceivable, understandable, operable and robust;
5. making them discoverable by providing information through metadata about their accessibility features;
6. ensuring that digital rights management measures do not block accessibility features.

Source: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A32019L0882

Resources

The European Accessibility Act – how does it impact publishers?

What does the European Accessibility Act Mean for Global Publishing?

The European Accessibility Act and Its Impact on the Publishing Industry: A Guide for Canadian Publishers (2021)