Making an ebook accessible

An ebook is the most accessible long-form reading format ever invented — when it is built honestly. The format reflows to any screen and any type size, screen readers can read it aloud, and fonts can be swapped for dyslexia-readable ones at the reader’s whim. Every one of those abilities depends on the same thing: the file saying what it contains, structurally, instead of just showing it.

That is the whole subject. An accessible EPUB is a well-structured one, and the overlap between “accessible” and “good” is nearly total.

What the reader’s tools need

Assistive reading is a set of tools, each with one requirement:

Screen readers speak the book aloud. They need real text — not images of text — in a sane reading order, real headings to navigate by, and alt text for images. A screen reader user reads a novel by chapter headings the way a sighted one skims by them; headings that are just large bold paragraphs are invisible to the navigation.

Magnification and reflow work automatically in EPUB — this is the format’s native gift, and the reason a fixed-layout book abandons it.

Text adaptation — dyslexia fonts, larger spacing, different colour themes — applies itself to real text and bounces off styled text exactly as a screen reader does.

Text-to-speech, built into most devices, has the same needs as a screen reader.

The common thread: every tool takes over the presentation, so the file must carry the meaning. Presentation-only books — big bold paragraphs, text baked into images — defeat all of them at once.

The practices, in order of value

1. Real headings, in order. Chapter titles are headings, section titles are subheadings, and the levels nest without skipping. This is the single highest-value change and the cheapest: it is the difference between a screen reader user navigating a book and page-turning through it. It is also the same structure the table of contents is generated from — one structure, two consumers.

2. Alt text on meaningful images. One or two sentences saying what the image contributes, not what it looks like: “map of the eight parishes of Jersey” beats “map”. Decorative images — ornaments, flourishes — take empty alt text, because describing them is noise. Charts and diagrams carry their content in words; the reader who cannot see the graph still needs the trend it shows.

3. A complete, linked contents. The navigation document is how assistive and ordinary readers alike move through the file; every chapter and every piece of back matter is an entry, under its real name.

4. Text as text. No pages as images, no pull quotes rendered as graphics. This is the failure that no amount of alt text repairs: a page that is a photograph is a page a screen reader cannot read at all.

5. Reading order. The file’s internal order should be the reading order. EPUB’s structure makes this natural; it breaks when layout hacks — positioned boxes, layout tables — are used to simulate design, and the screen reader then reads the book in construction order, which is gibberish.

6. Honest semantics throughout. Lists marked as lists, quotations marked as quotations, tables with header rows. Each is a one-line cost at build time and a continuous benefit in use — the screen reader announces “list of five items” instead of bullet characters with no context, and a quotation is spoken as quoted material rather than mistaken for the author’s voice.

What it costs

Almost nothing, when the book is built from structure — because everything above is a by-product of the same decisions that make an EPUB robust everywhere. The cost appears only when accessibility is retrofitted onto a presentation-built file: images of text re-typed, headings re-marked, a navigation document reconstructed. Retrofitting is the expensive path; building it in is nearly free.

The one place real effort goes: alt text, which is writing work, not structural work — someone must decide what each figure says.

Why the pressure is growing

Three forces, none of them charitable:

Law. The European Accessibility Act requires ebooks sold in the EU to be accessible from 2025, with narrow exemptions — self-published small-run works sit in an exception, but retailers and distributors respond to the law with blanket requirements rather than per-author legal analysis.

Purchasing. Libraries, school systems and corporate buyers increasingly specify accessible editions, and the metadata for declaring conformance is becoming part of the distribution checklist. A book that cannot say it is accessible is excluded from purchases it never sees.

Market. The readers who need these features are a large, loyal, underserved population — the same population large print serves in print — and accessibility metadata makes a book findable to them, which it otherwise is not.

The economics are the reverse of the print world’s: an accessible EPUB and an inaccessible one are built from the same text at the same cost, and one of them is excluded from a growing share of the market.

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Accessibility in an ebook is the structural honesty the format has always rewarded: say what things are, keep text as text, let the reader’s tools do their work. It is also, quietly, the same craft that makes an EPUB behave well on every device — the two goals were never in tension.

Nueel builds the accessible version by default, because it builds the correct version by default: real headings from the book’s structure, a generated navigation document, semantic quotations and notes, and alt text carried with the image — so the accessible edition is not a project, it is the book.

Common questions

What makes an ebook accessible?

Structure the technology can read: real headings instead of styled text, alt text on images that carry meaning, a complete linked table of contents, a correct reading order, and text kept as text. A book built that way works with screen readers, dyslexia-friendly fonts, text-to-speech and every magnification setting — because the format itself reflows, and the reader's tools can take over.

How do I write alt text for book images?

Say what the image contributes, in a sentence or two. A diagram's alt text carries its content — 'line graph: sales fall 40% between March and May'. A decorative ornament gets no description at all, because describing it adds noise for screen reader users. The test is: if the image were removed, what would the reader lose?

Is accessibility legally required for self-published ebooks?

Increasingly, in effect. The European Accessibility Act applies to ebooks sold in the EU from 2025, with limited exemptions for self-published works, and retailers and library platforms are asking publishers to declare accessibility conformance in the file's metadata. The direction of travel is unmistakable even where the letter of the law has an exception.

Does an accessible ebook look different?

Almost never. The changes are structural, not visual: a heading is still displayed large, but it is marked as a heading; a list still has bullets, but it is marked as a list. Accessible typography and attractive typography are the same practice — the difference is that one of them also tells the machine what it is looking at.