Last week we were delighted to host our first Campus Event of 2025, with an online panel discussion entitled The Road to EU Accessibility Act Readiness: Lessons, Tips and Checklists. The event was chaired by digital publishing consultant and accessibility specialist Simon Mellins, joined by expert panellists Leanne Dobson, UX Designer at Frontiers, Simon Holt, Senior Product Manager at Elsevier and Achim Bosse Chitty, Head of Production at Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

Our panel were not aiming to provide an ‘Accessibility 101’ briefing – after all, it’s 2025 and accessibility has been a vital discussion topic in the industry for years now. Instead, the goal of this event was to offer practical advice to help us all get ready for the implementation of the European Accessibility Act (EEA) on 28 June 2025.

Legal obligations

The discussion opened with a look at publishers’ legal obligations under the EEA. As Achim pointed out, the act is a directive that will be transformed into law under each member state’s own legal framework, so there’s no single unified set of obligations that will apply across all states; they will vary from one EU state to another. One strategy to deal with this would be to follow the legislation applied in your key market nation, but as English-language publications are likely to be sold across the entire EU area, a more watertight approach would be to publish according to the most demanding standard set by any of the nations.

Accessibility in different formats

Drilling down into the theme of accessibility across formats, Simon Holt described how EPUBs are highly customisable, offering dynamically reflowable text, while fixed layout PDFs are less attractive in terms of accessibility but can be the better choice for content that needs to be displayed in a specific way. The new PDF/UA format aims to bridge the gap between PDF and EPUB, by providing a more accessible fixed-layout format.

Many publishers also publish content on their own bespoke online platforms using HTML, which is a very flexible format that supports accessible functionality. It’s not just the content of books that needs to be accessible, of course – logins and registrations must be accessible too, and this can all too easily be forgotten.

Content requirements

The details of how to make specific types of content accessible across all ebooks are too numerous to go into here, but Simon Holt explained that publishers can find a really useful resource in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines compiled by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which set standards that publishers can apply to their electronic publications. These guidelines cover issues such as whether users can read a book with their eyes, their ears or their hands, whether texts are reflowable and images have alternative text, and whether any multimedia elements contain captions and audio descriptions. It’s also important for a book’s metadata to specify if there are any animations or other items that could be harmful to neurodivergent readers. 

Leanne provided information on the DPUB ARIA format, which helps to make online content more accessible in terms of web-specific elements such as media overlays and pop-up notes. 

Backlist strategy

In terms of bringing backlist titles up to the standards required by the EEA, there is a five-year exemption, meaning that publishers are not obliged to have every single published title meeting the required accessibility standard right away. However, as a typical publisher could have hundreds if not thousands of backlist titles, it’s important to make the most of this five-year period.

Achim recommended using prioritisation to ensure that titles with the highest sales potential are available as soon as possible, and Simon Mellins highlighted the importance of a solid and functional request system, so that readers can request an accessible version of any book in a publisher’s list and receive it in a reasonable timeframe.

Metadata

The final topic covered by the panel was metadata, perhaps one of the most important items in any publisher’s toolkit when it comes to discoverability. In the field of accessibility there are two key types of metadata: firstly, the metadata embedded in an EPUB’s .opf file, and secondly, the ONIX metadata that is sent out to all retailers and distributors. 

As Simon Holt put it, ‘I would say that ONIX components in particular are probably the most exciting from an end-user point of view, because they mean that you can clearly know, for example, in a maths book, whether MathML is present.’ Having this knowledge before making a purchase makes all the difference between having a book that is usable or not. This is one key step that all publishers should be taking, to ensure that all readers know whether books are accessible to them.

Next steps

After this fast-paced and wide-ranging discussion, our audience’s questions came flying in, and it’s clear that as a community we need to build our knowledge of what makes books accessible and how to make this happen. There’s no time to waste now, with the European Accessibility Act a mere four months away. Although there are exemptions for companies whose revenue and staff numbers fall below certain thresholds, it seems clear that making our content accessible is simply the right thing to do, and as Leanne pointed out, it’s also positive from the perspective of brand perception. The bottom line is that if our books are worth reading, they are worth reading by everyone.  

For more information on accessibility in publishing, Simon Mellins recommends visiting the UK Publishing Accessibility Action Group (PAAG) and joining their LinkedIn group.

We’d like to thank all our panellists, and everyone who attended this fascinating and informative discussion. We look forward to seeing you at future BookMachine events!