EPUB accessibility checker
Drop in an EPUB. It is checked for the accessibility information the European Accessibility Act has required of ebooks sold in the EU since 28 June 2025. Then every claim the book makes is tested against the file.
Why ebooks need this now
The European Accessibility Act applies to ebooks sold in the EU from 28 June 2025. Each book must carry information about its own accessibility, so stores can show it and readers can filter by it.
The standard behind it is EPUB Accessibility 1.1. It
requires three properties in every ebook: accessMode,
accessibilityFeature and accessibilityHazard,
whether or not the book claims to conform to anything else.
Many ebooks lack them, and nothing tells their authors: a missing property is not a validation error. EPUBCheck reports nothing, the upload works, and the listing never appears in an accessibility filter.
The harder question: are the claims true?
Listing the missing properties takes a checklist. Checking that the properties present are true takes opening the file.
A false claim is worse than none. A book declaring
alternativeText while four of its images have no
alt text tells stores to show it to the very readers it
fails.
The same applies to a claimed table of contents or page markers that are missing, and to a hazard statement of “none” next to a video. These are the findings marked ✕ below.
dcterms:conformsTo is valid only alongside
a11y:certifiedBy, which names who evaluated the book. A
conformance claim without it is reported.
If your book comes back empty
Most of the fix belongs in the manuscript, not the EPUB. In Word, right-click a picture, choose View Alt Text, and write one or two sentences that describe it.
A tool that builds the EPUB can then declare it truthfully. Torcul computes the metadata from the actual book, and withholds a claim when images have no descriptions.
The reference is EPUB Accessibility 1.1, and the permitted values are in the discovery vocabulary. The copy of the vocabulary used here is .