What it covers, and what it does not
The Act reaches e-books, dedicated e-reading devices, e-reading software, and the e-commerce around them — storefronts, apps and checkout flows. Print books are outside it. This is digital-only legislation.
Two features catch publishers out. The first is that scope follows the point of sale, not the place of incorporation: a publisher in Delhi, Chicago or Melbourne selling titles into EU retail platforms is inside it. The second is that the obligation runs down the supply chain — distributors, retailers, reading software, DRM providers, metadata aggregators and lending libraries all carry duties, which is why retailers have started demanding accessibility information before they will list a title.
The standards that actually demonstrate it
The Act itself is written as functional outcomes. The route to showing you have met them runs through EN 301 549, the harmonised European standard for ICT accessibility, which incorporates the WCAG Level AA success criteria.
For publications specifically the working pair is EPUB 3 and EPUB Accessibility 1.1. The latter defines how WCAG applies inside a publication, and — importantly — what conformance and evaluation metadata the file must carry: which version of the specification was met, at what WCAG level, who performed the evaluation, what credentials they hold, and where a fuller report can be found.
Automated validation has a place. It does not close the question. Tools check what tools can check; a conformance claim still rests on human evaluation, and the specification anticipates that the evaluator is named.
The requirement most publishers miss: metadata
Producing an accessible title is only half of it. The Act requires the accessibility of a publication to be described, and that description to travel through the supply chain so a reader can find it in a shop and a retailer can display it.
In practice this means two records kept in step:
- Inside the EPUB — schema.org accessibility properties in the package document: the access modes, the accessibility features present, any hazards, and a plain-language summary a reader can actually use.
- In the ONIX record — the corresponding accessibility codes in the metadata that goes to distributors and retailers.
Publishers still transmitting ONIX 2.1 cannot express this, which quietly turns the ONIX 3 migration from a technical improvement into a compliance dependency. An accessible book with no accessibility metadata is, from the market's point of view, an undocumented book.
Where the backlist stands
This is the genuinely contested part, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a confident one.
A transitional provision allows services already being provided before the application date to continue under prior terms for a further period. How far that shelters backlist e-books has been argued over since before the Act applied, and publishers have received conflicting advice. What is not in dispute is the direction of travel — and the industry bodies working closest to this have consistently advised publishers not to treat it as a licence to wait.
The sequence that reduces exposure fastest is unglamorous: make every new title born-accessible so the problem stops compounding, then work the backlist by priority — sales volume, adoption status, contractual exposure. Where the catalogue is large, a dated remediation plan you can produce on request is worth more than an unevidenced claim of compliance.
Exemptions, and how not to rely on them
There are two commonly cited routes out. Microenterprises providing services fall outside the services obligations. And where compliance would impose a disproportionate burden, that can be claimed — but it must be assessed and documented against the criteria, not asserted after the fact.
Neither is a plan. Both are positions you have to be able to defend with paperwork.
Penalties vary by member state
The EAA is a directive, so each member state transposed it into national law and set its own enforcement machinery. That means the consequences of non-compliance are not uniform across the single market: some states rely on administrative fines, some have set notably high ceilings, at least one provides for criminal penalties, and some require documented action plans on a recurring cycle.
If you sell across several EU markets, the practical implication is that the strictest national transposition among them effectively sets your standard.
If you also supply US instructional materials
There is a useful efficiency here. The structural work that makes a title EAA-ready — clean semantic structure, described images, correct reading order, a real navigation document — is the same work that underpins a NIMAS fileset and a PDF/UA file.
The expensive, judgement-heavy part is writing image descriptions, and that is done once. Publishers carrying obligations on both sides of the Atlantic generally should not be commissioning that twice.
A short checklist
- Confirm whether you sell into the EU. If you do, scope is settled.
- Assess representative titles and your storefront against EN 301 549 and WCAG.
- Switch new production to born-accessible EPUB 3 before anything else.
- Author schema.org accessibility metadata in the package document.
- Migrate to ONIX 3 and populate the accessibility codes.
- Rank the backlist and write a dated remediation plan.
- Record who evaluated conformance, against what, and when.
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