Westchester’s accessible digital production services support publishers’ compliance with the European Accessibility Act
Why do your ePubs need to be accessible?
- All books published after June 28 2025 must have an accessible ePub version available, to comply with the European Accessibility Act 2019.
- It makes commercial sense to provide ePubs that can be sold to and accessed by the 87 million people in Europe living with a disability.
- Digital ePub development is an opportunity to remove the residual barriers to accessing print media that people with disabilities have experienced.
What are our credentials?
Westchester is a Publishing Accessibility Action Group Ally. PAAG is a supportive community that fosters collaboration and encourages companies and publishing professionals in their accessibility journey. Its aim is to ensure that publications can be read by people with print disabilities. Its members include representatives from the publishing industry, publishing bodies, publishing technology organisations, disability associations, and people with lived experience of print disability. You can read about the PAAG Charter here.
Westchester is a Benetech Global Certified Accessible™ (GCA) Vendor. This means that Benetech, a leading authority for accessible content and a non-profit company, annually audits our processes and ePub files to ensure we meet their certification standards. You can read more information in this press release.
Benetech’s Standards
- ePub Accessibility 1.0 specification (the “Baseline”)
- World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
- (WCAG) 2.0 AA
- Accessibility metadata to promote conformance and discoverability of accessible publications
Our accessibility services
- Reflowable accessible ePub 3 files
- Alt text and long description creation
- Accessibility review of existing ePubs
- Update backlist ePubs for accessibility compliance
- Audio recording and audio transcripts
- Video captions
- Accessible web-ready PDFs
What are the attributes of an accessible ePub?
| Standard ePub | Accessible ePub | |
| Page navigation | ✔ | ✔ |
| Logical reading order | ✘ | ✔ |
| Alternative text for images and description | ✘ | ✔ |
| Tagged layout elements, e.g. landmarks, headings, tables, and links | ✘ | ✔ |
| Accessibility metadata | ✘ | ✔ |
| MathML for equations | ✘ | ✔ |
| Sufficient colour contrast in text and images | ✘ | ✔ |
| Transformable text (font and size can be changed by user) | ✔ | ✔ |
| Hazard warnings for audio and video inclusion | ✘ | ✔ |
| Tagged language changes | ✘ | ✔ |
Get in touch to learn more about our accessible ePub services.