The European Accessibility Act has applied to ebooks sold in the EU since 28 June 2025. Part of it has nothing to do with design: the book must carry information about its own accessibility, in a form stores can read, display and filter by. The standard behind that is EPUB Accessibility 1.1, which points to WCAG 2.1 for the content itself.
This page describes a technical standard, not the law. Whether the Act applies to you depends on where and what you sell, and on exemptions this page cannot assess. Read the regulation, or ask someone qualified.
Adding it is a small job, and many ebooks made before 2025 lack it. A missing property is not a validation error: EPUBCheck says nothing, the upload succeeds, and the listing never matches an accessibility filter.
The five properties
All five go in the package document, the .opf file inside the
EPUB, as <meta> elements in the metadata block. The
schema: prefix is reserved in EPUB 3, so it needs no declaration.
01 accessMode required
Which senses a reader needs to take in the content. A novel needs one line; a book with images needs two.
The values are textual, visual,
auditory and tactile, one element per value. A
comma-separated list is a common mistake; it looks correct until something
tries to match it.
02 accessibilityFeature required
What the book does to be readable. For an ordinary reflowable book, four or five of these are already true:
structuralNavigation means real headings a reading app can jump
between; unlocked, no DRM between the book and assistive
technology. displayTransformability means the reader's own type
size and typeface survive, which is false if the stylesheet overrides them,
as any stylesheet using !important does.
If no value applies, write none. Leaving the property out is the
one thing not allowed.
Two changes: printPageNumbers has been merged into
pageBreakMarkers, and annotations and
bookmarks have been removed. They still parse, but no longer
describe anything.
03 accessibilityHazard required
Whether anything flashes, simulates motion or makes a sound. For a text ebook, the answer is one line:
The other values are flashing, motionSimulation,
sound, their no…Hazard negations, and
unknown. none beside a named hazard is a
contradiction.
04 accessModeSufficient recommended
The question a screen reader user asks: can I get all of this from the text alone? Give a set of modes that is sufficient on its own, comma-separated in one element.
textual alone is true of a novel, and of an illustrated book
whose images are all described, since a description is text. It
becomes false the moment one image carries meaning written down nowhere;
then the value is textual,visual.
05 accessibilitySummary recommended
One sentence for a human reader that adds something the other four fields do not say.
Required in EPUB Accessibility 1.0, only recommended in 1.1.
The conformance claim
A sixth thing can be added, outside the five:
The two go together: the standard requires a11y:certifiedBy
with any dcterms:conformsTo. Many files have the first without
the second, and validators do not mention it.
WCAG 2.1 AA covers the whole book — every image, table and use of color — and most of that comes from the manuscript. Describing what the book is and certifying nothing is defensible; claiming a level nobody evaluated is not.
The rule nobody writes down
A property that is not true of the file is worse than one that is
missing. A book with no metadata is invisible to an accessibility
filter. A book claiming alternativeText with four undescribed
images is found through that filter and unusable by the reader who used
it.
Four common false claims:
alternativeTextclaimed, images undescribed. Usually metadata copied from a template, or added by a tool that assumed instead of checking.tableOfContentsclaimed, no navigation document. Usually a conversion that dropped the nav file.pageBreakMarkersclaimed, no page markers. This matters to students and scholars who bought the file to cite the print edition.accessModeSufficient: textualwith undescribed images. It says the text carries everything; where those images are, it carries nothing.
None of these are validation errors. They are found only by comparing what the file claims with what it contains, which is what the checker does.
Where the descriptions come from
The real work is the alt text, and it comes from the manuscript, not the
ebook. In Word, right-click a picture, choose View Alt Text,
and write one or two sentences that describe it. It carries
through any tool that reads a .docx properly.
A label is not a description. alt="Figure",
alt="image3" and alt="chart.png" say something is
there, not what it is. Keep them, but do not count those images as described.
Some versions of Word filled that field with the file name, so many books
look described and are not.
Decoration — a divider, an ornament, a repeated flourish — gets
alt="", which tells a screen reader to skip it. Software cannot reliably tell an ornament from a diagram, so the author
decides.
Check your own file
The free EPUB accessibility checker reads an ebook in your browser, without uploading it. It reports which of the five properties are present, whether every value is one the vocabulary defines, and whether the file supports each claim. It also counts the images that carry a real description rather than a label.
It does not say whether a store will accept or list the book. It checks against a published standard and shows the date; what a retailer does with that is its decision.
Torcul writes this metadata from the book itself. It
claims alternativeText only when every image has a description;
when one does not, it sets accessModeSufficient to
textual,visual and shows the count before you download.