From June 2025, anyone selling eBooks into the European Union is expected to meet accessibility requirements, and the retailers have started asking. Accessible EPUB formatting means real semantic structure, described images, declared metadata and a reading order that a screen reader can follow. We build to EPUB Accessibility 1.1 and WCAG 2.2 AA, and we tell you plainly what we can and cannot claim on your behalf.
An accessible EPUB is one that works when the reader cannot see it, cannot see it well, or cannot use it the way you assumed. That means a blind reader with a screen reader, a partially sighted reader at 300 percent magnification, a dyslexic reader who has swapped your typeface for their own, and somebody navigating with a keyboard rather than a fingertip.
None of that is achieved by a plugin. It comes from the structure of the file: headings that are headings, images that are described, a reading order that follows the argument, a declared language, tables with real header cells, and mathematics marked up as mathematics rather than pasted in as a picture. It is ordinary formatting done honestly.
On top of the structure sits the metadata. EPUB accessibility metadata declares what your book contains and what it supports, so that a reader with specific needs can tell from the shop page whether the book is usable before they spend money finding out that it is not.
There is a growing trade in accessibility badges, and we are not part of it. We are a formatting studio. We build your file to a published specification, we test it, and we document exactly what we did and what the file supports.
What we will not do is tell you that you are legally compliant, because that is a determination for a lawyer or a formal auditor and not for the people who set your type. Anyone selling you certainty about your legal position from a formatting quote is selling you something they cannot deliver.
We can demonstrate that a file meets a technical standard. Whether that satisfies a particular jurisdiction is a legal question, and we will say so rather than guess in your favour.
An accessibility declaration is a statement of fact about your file. Overstating it is worse than declaring nothing, because a reader will buy on the strength of it.
It is not a switch applied at the end. If the structure is wrong, no amount of metadata rescues it, and we would rather rebuild the structure than decorate a broken one.
Everything below is part of the standard build. None of it is an upgrade, because a file missing any one of these is not accessible in any meaningful sense.
Every heading a real heading, in a hierarchy that does not skip levels. Lists marked as lists, quotations as quotations, and the epub:type semantics applied so that a chapter announces itself as a chapter. This is the foundation everything else rests on, and it is the thing most files get wrong before they get anything else wrong.
Somebody reads the book, looks at each image in the context of the sentence it sits beside, and writes a description of what it contributes. Decorative images are marked as decorative so they are skipped in silence rather than announced. Complex figures get an extended description. No filename is ever repeated back to a reader as though it meant something.
The order in which a screen reader speaks your book is the spine and the document order inside it, and in converted files those routinely disagree with the order a sighted reader perceives. Sidebars land mid-sentence, captions arrive before figures. We set the order deliberately and then listen to it.
The accessMode, accessModeSufficient and accessibilityFeature declarations written correctly, plus a human-readable accessibilitySummary describing what your book actually supports. Retailers surface this on the product page, and library and institutional buyers filter their purchasing on it.
Relative units throughout, no fixed pixel type sizes, no locked line heights and nothing that stops a reader enlarging the text to 200 percent or beyond without content disappearing off the edge. Colour contrast checked against the WCAG ratios, and no meaning ever carried by colour alone.
Real table headers associated with their cells, so a screen reader can announce which column a figure belongs to. Notes linked in both directions. Equations marked up as MathML rather than flattened into images, so they can be read aloud, magnified and rendered in braille.
Accessibility work is mostly invisible in a screenshot, because a well-structured book looks like an ordinary book. These are the layers behind it.
Both produce an accessible book. They differ in how much evidence you can hand to somebody who asks for it, and evidence costs money.
The file is structured, described, declared and tested. It meets EPUB Accessibility 1.1 and WCAG 2.2 AA as we build it, and the accessibility metadata in the package tells a reader honestly what it supports.
This is the right choice for most independent authors and small presses. Your readers get a book that works, the retailers get metadata they can display, and you have not paid for paperwork that nobody is going to ask you for.
The same build, plus a formal conformance report produced with the DAISY tooling and a manual audit, a completed accessibility statement, and a written record of every decision and its justification.
You want this if you sell to universities, libraries or public institutions, if you are a publisher with a procurement process to satisfy, or if a distributor has asked you for evidence rather than an assurance. It is the difference between being accessible and being able to prove it.
These six turn up again and again, in books that were otherwise carefully made. Every one of them is invisible to a sighted reader.
Eight requirements, each with a defined technique and a defined reason. These are the things that either exist in your file or do not.
| Element | How we build it | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Heading hierarchy | Real h1 to h6 elements in a hierarchy that never skips a level, with epub:type semantics naming each section as a chapter, part, preface or appendix. | A screen reader user navigates by heading. Without a hierarchy there is no way to move through the book except linearly, which makes a reference book unusable and a long book exhausting. |
| Text alternatives | Every meaningful image given alt text written in context. Decorative images given an empty alt attribute so they are skipped. Complex figures given an extended description in the text. | WCAG 1.1.1 is the most-failed criterion in publishing. An undescribed diagram is content the reader has paid for and cannot reach. |
| Reading order | The spine and the document order set so the linearised sequence matches the sense of the book, with sidebars and captions placed where they belong in the argument. | This is what a screen reader speaks, top to bottom. If it disagrees with the visual order, the book is heard as a jumble no sighted proofreader would ever have noticed. |
| Language declaration | The primary language declared in the package and on the root element, with lang attributes on any passage in another language. | Determines pronunciation, hyphenation and braille translation. An undeclared language is one of the fastest ways to fail an institutional buyer's check. |
| Accessibility metadata | accessMode, accessModeSufficient, accessibilityFeature, accessibilityHazard and a written accessibilitySummary, all in the package document. | This is what retailers display and what library systems filter on. It is also the only way a reader can know before buying whether the book will work for them. |
| Colour and contrast | Text and background contrast checked against the WCAG 2.2 AA ratios, with no information conveyed by colour alone anywhere in the book. | Low contrast defeats partially sighted readers, and colour-coded meaning defeats colour-blind readers entirely. Both are trivial to avoid and routinely are not. |
| Table semantics | Real th elements with scope attributes, captions where the table needs one, and no layout tables anywhere in the book. | Header associations are what let a screen reader announce a cell as belonging to a column. Without them a data table is read as an undifferentiated string of numbers. |
| Mathematics and notation | Equations marked up as MathML, with a rendered fallback image where a reading system cannot cope, and alt text on that fallback. | MathML can be spoken, magnified and rendered in braille. An equation pasted in as a picture can be none of those, and in a technical book that is most of the content gone. |
Automated tooling finds what can be counted. A person with a screen reader finds what actually matters. Both run on every book.
The reference accessibility checker for EPUB, run against the finished package. It catches missing alt attributes, contrast failures, skipped heading levels and absent metadata, and it produces a report we attach to the delivery. It is thorough, it is objective, and it is nowhere near sufficient on its own.
VoiceOver and NVDA, with a person listening to the book rather than looking at it. This is where you discover that the caption is read before the figure, that a decorative flourish is being announced as image, and that your alt text describes the picture without saying what it means.
The book taken to 200 percent and beyond, checking that nothing is clipped, that no text is trapped in a container that will not grow, and that the reader can still reach every word without scrolling horizontally, which WCAG treats as a failure.
Accessibility metadata sits inside the package document, which means a malformed declaration is a validation error as well as an accessibility failure. The file is validated before the accessibility pass and again afterwards.
A Kindle with the screen reader active, an iPad with VoiceOver, a phone at the largest available text size. Accessibility features behave differently on every device, and a file that works with NVDA on a desktop can still fail on the hardware your reader owns.
A person works through the WCAG 2.2 AA criteria that apply to publications and records a finding against each one. It is slow. It is also the only way to produce a conformance claim that would survive somebody checking it.
The file, the declarations inside it, and the documentation that lets you answer a buyer who asks how accessible it actually is.
Semantically structured, fully described, correctly declared and validated. It is an ordinary EPUB that any reader can buy and read normally, because accessible formatting is not a separate edition and should never be sold as one.
Every declaration written into your package, listed in plain English so you can see exactly what your book claims about itself. If you ever have to answer a distributor's questionnaire, the answers are on this page.
The DAISY checker output, unedited, attached in full. If it reports anything we chose not to change, the reason is written down next to it rather than quietly omitted from the summary.
The human-readable paragraph that appears on retailer product pages, written properly rather than assembled from boilerplate. This is what a blind reader reads before deciding whether to buy your book, so it is worth more care than most people give it.
Every image in the book, its alt text, and whether it was treated as meaningful or decorative and why. Useful for reprints, translations and for the next book, where the same decisions will come round again.
The formal document: the criteria assessed, the findings, the techniques used, and a plain statement of what conforms and what does not. Suitable for handing to an institutional buyer. Not a legal certification, and it does not pretend to be one.
Structure first, description second, declaration third. In that order, because reversing it produces a file that claims more than it delivers.
We read what you have and count what has to be described. The image count, the table count and the presence of mathematics are what drive the real cost, and we would rather tell you the number before you commit than after.
Headings, sections, lists, quotations, notes and tables, marked up as what they are. Nothing about the visual design changes at this stage. The book looks identical and is now navigable by somebody who cannot see it.
A person reads the book and describes each image in the context of the argument it supports. Decorative images are marked as such. Complex figures get extended descriptions. This is the slowest step and the one that carries most of the value.
accessMode, accessibilityFeature and the written summary, describing what the file genuinely supports. If something is not there, it is not declared, because a false declaration is worse for a reader than an empty one.
Ace, EPUBCheck, magnification, and then a screen reader read-through by somebody listening rather than looking. Findings are fixed and the book is tested again before it comes back to you.
Priced on word count as a base, but the real cost driver is description work: images to write alt text for, tables to structure, and equations to mark up. The steps below adjust for exactly that.
Required steps are marked with *. Optional extras can be removed from the summary with the cross icon.
The kind of content, which determines how much of the book has to be described rather than merely structured.
Total word count including all front and back matter, since every part of the book has to be structured and declared.
How much documented evidence of conformance you need alongside the accessible file itself.
Tables, notes and mathematics are where accessibility work becomes genuinely difficult, and this step prices that honestly.
The single biggest cost driver. Every meaningful image needs a description written by somebody who has read the book.
Standard allows time for the description work and the screen reader pass. The faster tiers buy queue position, not fewer checks.
Two rounds are included. Description wording in particular often benefits from a second look.
This buys an accessible file and honest documentation of what it supports. It is not a legal certification, and we will not sell you one. Editing, proofreading, cover artwork, narration recording, ISBN registration and uploading to your retailer accounts are all outside it.
A great many files now carry accessibility metadata. Rather fewer of them are accessible. Here is where the two part company.
| What you are comparing | Metadata Bolted On Afterwards | Book Formatting Experts |
|---|---|---|
| Image descriptions | ✕ Filenames, or a generic label, or nothing at all. The declaration says the images are described. They are not. | ✓ Written by a person who read the surrounding page and understood what the image was contributing to it. |
| Heading structure | ✕ Styled paragraphs that look like chapter titles, so a screen reader user cannot skip or jump anywhere. | ✓ A real hierarchy with epub:type semantics, so the book can be navigated by structure rather than endured in sequence. |
| The metadata itself | ✕ Copied from another book, claiming features the file does not have, which misleads the reader it was meant to help. | ✓ Declared from what the file genuinely supports, with a written summary that a blind reader can rely on before buying. |
| Reading order | ✕ Whatever order the converter produced, with captions read before figures and sidebars landing mid-sentence. | ✓ Set deliberately and then listened to by somebody with a screen reader, because listening is the only way to find it. |
| Tables and equations | ✕ Layout tables, header rows that are only visually headers, and equations flattened into pictures. | ✓ Header associations, scope attributes, and MathML that can be spoken, enlarged and rendered in braille. |
| What you can prove | ✕ Nothing. If a distributor asks for evidence, there is none, and the declaration will not survive being checked. | ✓ The Ace report, a criterion-by-criterion audit on request, and a plain account of what conforms and what does not. |
The standard is the same for everyone. The work is not, and pretending it is would be how you end up quoted badly.
The easiest book to make genuinely accessible and the one most often overlooked. Structure, reading order, language declaration and honest metadata, and a novel is done. There is little to describe, so the cost is low, which makes the excuse for not doing it thinner here than anywhere else.
The market where accessibility is not optional. Universities have procurement rules, and a textbook that a blind student cannot use is a title the institution cannot buy. MathML, structured tables, extended figure descriptions and a linked index, all documented well enough to survive a formal review.
Full of charts that carry the argument and are usually described as chart. A bar chart's alt text has to say what the chart shows, not what it looks like. Worksheets and exercises need real form semantics rather than lines drawn on a page.
The hardest honest conversation we have. A fixed-layout picture book is inherently difficult to make accessible, and a blind child deserves a description of every page rather than a shrug. Where the design allows, we will steer you towards a reflowable build, and where it does not, we describe every spread.
Recipes are structured data pretending to be prose. Ingredient lists need list semantics, method steps need ordered lists, and quantities in tables need header associations. Done properly, a cook using a screen reader can follow your recipe. Done as it usually is, they cannot.
Photographs that carry emotional weight and are almost never described. A family portrait described as photo is a page of the book the reader has been quietly excluded from. These descriptions require writing rather than labelling, and they are worth the time.
EPUB Accessibility 1.1 is a real specification with real, testable requirements, and it points at WCAG 2.2 for the criteria themselves. A file either applies those techniques or it does not, and that is checkable by anybody who cares to check. That is the part we can stand behind without qualification.
The European Accessibility Act is a different kind of thing. It is legislation, transposed differently in each member state, and it addresses your obligations rather than your file. We can build a file that meets the technical standard the legislation points at. We cannot tell you that you are legally compliant, and you should be wary of anybody who says they can.
Accessibility metadata is a promise made to a reader who has fewer options than you do. Overstating it wastes their money and their time, which is a worse outcome than declaring nothing at all.
Alt text that says photograph of a graph has told the reader nothing. The description has to carry whatever the image was contributing to the page, or it is decoration wearing a label.
Every automated tool in existence can pass a file that is incoherent when spoken aloud. Somebody has to put the headphones on and listen to the book, and there is no substitute for it.
Every one of these is confirmed on the finished file, and the findings are written down rather than assumed.
For some publishers this is now a condition of doing business. For others it is simply the right way to build a book.
The European Accessibility Act has applied to eBooks since June 2025, and distributors have begun passing the requirement down to the people who supply them. If your book reaches EU readers through any retailer, this has already arrived at your door whether or not anyone has told you.
Institutional procurement checks accessibility before it checks anything else. A title that cannot be used by a student with a print disability is a title the institution is not permitted to purchase, however good the book is.
Aggregators and library suppliers increasingly want a conformance report or a completed accessibility questionnaire, and an assurance in an email will not satisfy them. This is the point at which the documentation stops being optional.
Somewhere around one reader in twenty has a print disability. They buy books, they review books, and they talk to each other about which publishers make files they can actually use. That is a market, and most of it is currently underserved.
Titles built years ago with tools that never considered accessibility, sitting on stores now, quietly failing the requirement. Remediation is usually cheaper than authors expect, because the structure often only needs correcting rather than rebuilding.
It costs more to do this and it is the right way to make a book. A file that a blind reader can use is a better file for everyone, and the same structure that serves a screen reader is what makes your book navigable, searchable and durable.
Accessibility attracts a great deal of overclaiming. Here is the line we hold.
The techniques are applied, the file is tested with Ace and with a screen reader, and any criterion we could not meet is written down along with the reason. You get a file built to the standard and an honest account of where it stands against it.
No image in your book is ever described by a machine or labelled from its filename. Somebody reads the page, understands what the picture is doing there, and writes that down. This is the expensive part and it is the part that makes the file worth anything.
We build files. We do not issue legal compliance certificates, because a formatting studio has no standing to do so, and a badge from us would be worth precisely nothing in a dispute. We give you the file, the evidence and the truth about what they do and do not prove.
It is a legal requirement in some markets and an advantage in all of them. These are the three reasons that hold even where no law applies.
Libraries, universities and public institutions filter their purchasing on accessibility metadata. A book without it is invisible to that filter, which means an entire class of buyer never saw your title in the first place and never told you why.
Real headings, proper tables, described figures and a coherent reading order are what make a book navigable, searchable and durable. Accessibility work is mostly just formatting done to a standard, and the whole file benefits.
Fixing a published catalogue means reopening files, rewriting descriptions and re-uploading to every store. Building it in on the first pass costs a fraction of doing it again later under a deadline somebody else has set for you.
Three principles, applied in this order, on every accessible build.
An image description in a book with no headings is a kindness in a building with no doors. The semantic structure comes first, because it is what a screen reader user navigates with before they reach a single figure.
The question is never what does this picture look like. It is what would the reader lose if it were not there. The answer to that question is the alt text, and it is why a person has to read the book.
The metadata is a statement of fact about the file, read by people who will make a purchasing decision on it. It gets written last, from what the finished book actually supports, and never from what we hoped it would.
Rated 4.9 out of 5 across 137 reviewed projects.
I had already paid someone else to format this book once. The chapter headings shifted every time a reader changed the font size and I only found out from a review. This team rebuilt the interior from the structure up and sent me photographs from four real devices before I uploaded anything. First launch day I have not spent refreshing the reviews in a panic.
What sold me was the audit. They came back and told me two chapters had been pasted in from another document and were carrying invisible styles, and that fixing that first would save me money later. Nobody had mentioned it in three years of self-publishing. The proof needed no corrections at all.
My book has footnotes, tables and two appendices, and every quote I got either ignored that or doubled the price because of it. Here the pricing was laid out step by step and I could see what each element cost before I committed. It arrived early and the notes link both ways, which nobody else had even offered.
The proof came back from the printer with the margins exactly where they should be, the running heads correct, and not one chapter opening on a left-hand page. This is my fourth book and the first time I have not had to pay for a second proof copy.
English is my second language and I was nervous about the back and forth. Everything was explained plainly, and when I asked the same question twice they answered as if it were the first time. The revisions were turned round inside two days and I was never made to feel like a nuisance.
I write cookbooks, so the interior is the product. Ingredients have to sit beside the method or the recipe stops working, and the last person I hired reflowed the whole thing into nonsense. These people understood the problem before I had finished describing it and the finished layout is genuinely beautiful.
Straightforward from beginning to end. A fixed price, a delivery window they actually hit, and files that went up to KDP and IngramSpark without a single rejection. I have since sent them two more titles and recommended them to my writing group without hesitation.
My memoir has photographs and I had resigned myself to them looking muddy. They optimised every image, told me honestly which two were too low-resolution to save, and suggested crops instead of shrugging. That candour is worth more to me than the discount I was chasing elsewhere.
I sent them a 480-page reference book with a nightmare of cross-references and a table on nearly every spread. They quoted it accurately, they did not come back later asking for more money, and the index still works. Any author will tell you what that is worth.
The questions authors actually ask us, answered without sales language.
Accessible EPUB formatting builds the file so that it works for readers who cannot see it, cannot see it well, or navigate it differently. That means real semantic structure, described images, a coherent reading order, a declared language and honest accessibility metadata in the package. Ordinary formatting is concerned with how a book looks. Accessible formatting is concerned with what it is, structurally, underneath the appearance.
It is EU legislation that has applied to eBooks and eBook retail since June 2025. Broadly, if your books are sold to readers in the European Union, the requirement reaches you, and in practice it arrives through your distributor rather than through a letter from a regulator. We can build your file to the technical standard the legislation points at. Whether your particular business is legally compliant is a question for a lawyer, and we will not pretend to answer it.
EPUB Accessibility 1.1 is the publishing specification. It sets out what an accessible EPUB has to do, and for the detailed criteria it points at WCAG, which is the wider web accessibility standard. WCAG 2.2 level AA is the conformance level publishing has settled on. In practice you meet WCAG's criteria using EPUB's techniques, and the two are checked together rather than separately.
It is a set of declarations inside your package describing what the book contains and what it supports: accessMode, accessModeSufficient, accessibilityFeature, accessibilityHazard and a written accessibilitySummary. Retailers display it, library systems filter on it, and a reader with a print disability uses it to decide whether to buy. It is the only way somebody can know in advance whether your book will work for them.
It is the human-readable paragraph that appears on retailer pages, describing in plain language what your book supports and what it does not. Yes, we write it, and we write it from the finished file rather than from a template. It is worth real care, because for some readers it is the deciding factor on whether to spend money on your book.
No, and neither can anyone else selling you formatting. We build to a published technical standard, we test against it, and we document precisely what we found. Legal compliance is a determination for a lawyer or a formal auditor, and a badge issued by a typesetting studio would carry no weight anywhere it mattered. We would rather say this plainly than sell you false comfort.
Good alt text says what the image contributes to the page, not what it depicts. A bar chart's description has to state what the chart shows. A photograph in a memoir has to carry whatever the photograph was carrying. Generated descriptions cannot do this, because they have not read the surrounding argument. Every description in a book we build is written by a person who has.
A decorative image carries no information: a chapter ornament, a rule, a flourish. If it is not explicitly marked as decorative, a screen reader announces it, and a reader with thirty chapter ornaments in a book hears the word image thirty times for no purpose. Marking it means the reader passes over it in silence, which is exactly what a sighted reader does.
Because a screen reader speaks the file in document order, and that order is invisible to you. In converted files, captions frequently precede their figures, sidebars interrupt sentences, and pull quotes land in the middle of a paragraph they were pulled from. Sighted proofreaders never catch it because it looks perfectly correct. The only way to find it is to close your eyes and listen to the book.
Partially, and we will be honest with you about the limits. A fixed-layout book cannot be reflowed, cannot be enlarged the way a reflowable book can, and is fundamentally harder for a screen reader to work with. We can describe every image thoroughly, set a correct reading order and declare the file honestly. Where the design permits, we will suggest a reflowable build instead, because it is a genuinely better outcome for the reader.
Ace is the reference accessibility checker for EPUB. It finds missing alt attributes, skipped heading levels, contrast failures and absent metadata. It is genuinely useful and it is not enough, because it cannot tell whether your alt text is meaningful or whether the reading order makes sense when spoken. A file can pass Ace cleanly and still be incoherent to listen to.
Real header cells with scope attributes, so a screen reader can announce which column and row a value belongs to. A caption where the table needs one. And no layout tables anywhere, because a table used for positioning is read aloud as a table and confuses everybody. Without header associations, a data table is spoken as an undifferentiated run of numbers with nothing to anchor them.
They can stay as images and your technical book will then be unusable to a significant part of its audience. MathML can be read aloud, magnified without blurring and rendered on a braille display. An equation pasted in as a picture can do none of those things, and in a book where the mathematics is the content, that is most of the book gone.
Almost never, and where it does, only for the better. Nearly all of this work is structural and invisible: the same page, marked up honestly underneath. The one place a sighted reader might notice is colour contrast, where a pale grey we would have to darken. We will show you before we change anything about the visual design.
Yes, and remediation is a substantial part of this practice. Backlist remediation usually means adding structure that was never there, writing descriptions for images that were never described, and declaring metadata that was never present. It is generally cheaper than authors expect, and if you have a catalogue, the same faults tend to run through all of it, so the second title costs less than the first.
On an illustrated book, most of it. Structure and metadata are quick and largely mechanical. Writing a considered description for each of ninety figures is days of somebody reading the book and thinking about what each picture is doing there. That is why the image step in the calculator moves the price as sharply as it does, and it is the honest reflection of where the hours go.
In institutional and library markets, they sell where inaccessible books cannot be bought at all, so the difference is absolute rather than marginal. In retail the effect is quieter, but a reader with a print disability who finds a publisher whose files reliably work tends to stay with that publisher, and readers talk to each other about who those publishers are.
It has a much higher ceiling, which is not the same thing. A reflowable EPUB can be enlarged, restyled, spoken and navigated by structure, and a PDF resists all four. But a reflowable EPUB with no headings, no descriptions and no declared language is not accessible either. The format makes accessibility possible. The formatting is what makes it actual.
The standard service produces a well-built, valid, conformant EPUB and that is a genuinely good file. This service adds the description work, the criterion-by-criterion testing, the screen reader read-through and the accessibility declarations, all of which are labour rather than tooling. The price difference is the hours a person spends reading your book and describing it, which is not something that can be automated away.
The manuscript and an honest count of the images, tables and equations in it. Word count sets the base, but the description work is what actually drives the figure, so a novel with two maps and a textbook of the same length are very different jobs. Send the book and we will tell you which one you have.
Whether a distributor has started asking questions, an institution has refused your title, or you would simply rather do this properly, send us the manuscript and we will tell you what an accessible build of it actually involves.