The EU Accessibility Act (EAA) for EPUB publishers

The EAA is a single EU directive that sets common accessibility requirements for a range of products and services, including e-books and the software used to read them. In practice it means that most ebooks made available to consumers in the EU on or after 28 June 2025 must be produced and sold in an accessible format, with the accessibility information disclosed to the buyer. You can read the directive itself on EUR-Lex.

The obligation is broad but not unlimited. It applies to products placed on the market from the application date, so parts of an existing backlist may fall under transitional arrangements, and some very small operators — for example microenterprises that only provide certain services — can be out of scope. These carve-outs are narrow and defined at national level, so treat them as something to confirm, not to assume.

The EAA describes outcomes, not file formats. The recognised way to meet it for ebooks is EPUB Accessibility 1.1, the W3C standard, which in turn builds on WCAG 2.1 level AA. Hit those two and you are aligned with what regulators, retailers and reading systems expect. You can read the standard at W3C.

Concretely, an accessible EPUB has meaningful alternative text on images that carry information, a logical heading structure, a correct reading order, the content language declared, data tables marked up as tables rather than as layout, and a working navigation document (nav). These are the elements a screen reader, a refreshable braille display or a text-to-speech engine relies on to make the book usable.

One change catches many publishers by surprise: accessibility metadata. EPUB Accessibility 1.1 expects each file to declare, in schema.org terms, how accessible it is — through properties such as accessibilityFeature, accessibilityHazard, accessMode and a human-readable accessibilitySummary.

This is no longer invisible plumbing. Major retailers and library platforms now surface this metadata on the product page, so a reader can see before buying whether a title has alt text, structured navigation or any flashing-content hazard. Missing or dishonest metadata is both a compliance gap and a lost sale.

The reference checker is Ace by DAISY, the open-source tool from the DAISY Consortium. It audits an EPUB against EPUB Accessibility and WCAG and produces a detailed report of what passes and what fails. It is the same engine the wider industry trusts, so its verdict is one retailers and aggregators recognise.

Origami runs Ace for you and then goes a step further. Mechanical problems — missing language declarations, absent or incomplete accessibility metadata, and some structural fixes — can be repaired with AI-assisted tooling in place. Anything that needs editorial judgement, above all writing alt text that actually conveys what an image means, is flagged for a human rather than guessed at. The result is fewer manual passes and a file you can stand behind.

You do not have to remediate everything at once. A sensible order is: fix what is actively on sale into the EU first, prioritise titles with heavy image or table content (where accessibility gaps are largest), and bake accessibility into your production pipeline so new EPUBs are born compliant rather than retrofitted.

For older or specialised material, keep an eye on the nuances — transitional periods, the disproportionate-burden provisions, and micro-operator exemptions all exist, but they are narrow and evidence-based. The safe default is to assume a consumer ebook needs to be accessible and to document your reasoning wherever you rely on an exception.