Accessibility is about more than just ticking compliance boxes – it’s primarily about ensuring equal access and meaningful engagement with digital content. That said, aligning with the European Accessibility Act (EAA) is a great place to start.
With a month until the legal enforcement of the EAA on 28th June 2025, it is vital that publishers take steps to ensure their content meets the required standards.
At Easypress, we’ve been meticulously enhancing our Atomik platforms for over two years to deliver accessible EPUB3 files that comply with the impending EAA regulations.
Both our assisted styling software, Atomik eStylist, and our print and ebook production platform, Atomik ePublisher, are helping the publishing industry produce accessible digital content.
To ensure our software continues to generate accessible and EAA-compliant ebooks, we're constantly making improvements to our Atomik platforms, such as:
Atomik eStylist:
- AeS now has the ability to add and edit image alt-text.
- Language properties are displayed in the Manual pane for paragraphs and table parts.
- Language properties can be set in the Find pane on the matched text spans.
- Improvements have been made to the handling of lists.
Atomik ePublisher:
Metadata
- All accessibility metadata is included as per the current and relevant compliance specifications.
Language
- Any sections which are in a secondary language are marked as such. Specifically, the <package> element of the OPF file has an xml:lang attribute that specifies the language of the metadata.
- The <dc:language> tag listed in the metadata section of the OPF file has the language of the book.
- Each <html> file is marked at the top of each content document, with both the lang and xml:lang attributes.
- Secondary language passages are marked up with lang and xml:lang attributes.
HTML Considerations
- All main section blocks within the book are marked with <section> tags.
- Block quotations are marked up with <blockquote> tags.
- Emphasised content marked up with the proper semantic elements (e.g., <em>, <i>, <b>, <strong>).
- Sidebars are marked up with <aside> tags.
- All content with captions (illustrations, photographs, etc.) is marked up with a <figure> element and the caption with <figcaption>.
- Context breaks are marked up with <hr/> elements.
CSS Considerations
- (*) Drop-caps are implemented via CSS, so words are not split with <span> tags.
- (*) Content in all capital letters is marked up correctly (i.e., using font-variant:small-caps; or text-transform:uppercase; in the CSS.
Navigation
- The list of sections in the navigation file is organised hierarchically using nested lists if applicable.
- The table of contents in the body matter are linked to the relevant entry.
- The table of contents in the body matter entries are organised hierarchically in a list to mirror the navigation file.
Page Navigation
- Where supplied, the book has page navigation via a page list which is included in the navigation file.
- Print-based page numbering has the pagination source included in the OPF file and page breaks are coded with proper markup.
Headings
- HTML headings (<h1> to <h6>) are used for every section that has a heading.
- All <section> tags with ARIA roles or aria-labels are used for sections without headings (cover, title page, etc.).
- The heading structure is correctly structured with a complete hierarchy.
Links
- All URLs in the text are marked up as links.
- Links have useful link text, and that text is descriptive and concise.
Images
- All images, including the ebook cover, are described with alt-text as necessary.
- Presentation images are marked with the correct ARIA role.
Tables
- Tables are marked up correctly.
- Tables with captions at the beginning have a <caption> tag associate.
Lists
- Lists are used to mark up sections like table of contents, bibliographies, and indexes.
- All other obvious lists of items in the body matter of the book are marked up as HTML lists.
Footnotes/Endnotes
- Footnotes and endnote references are linked to their corresponding notes.
- Footnotes and endnotes have a link to return to their note reference in the text.
- Footnotes are marked up using <aside> tags.
(*) Coming soon!
Easypress is a publishing production software and services company based in the UK, delivering award-winning technology globally for over 20 years.
To find out how our team can help you create accessible digital content thats meet EAA regulations, get in touch via our contact page.
Alternatively, you can schedule an online meeting with us for a time to suit you via Calendly.
