Accessible Books: when the page opens, so does education

Same classroom. Same exam. Same book. One student opens the textbook and starts reading. The other searches for an accessible version of the same book but finds none.

Today, April 23, is World Book Day — a date created to celebrate reading as a space for pleasure and discovery. For students, though, a book is also something else: it's the main channel through which we access education. When that channel breaks down, it's not just a page left blank. It's a right that stops.

We want to talk about what happens when textbooks aren't accessible, what the law says, and — most importantly — how we can change things as publishers, institutions, companies, and people who design content.

What you'll take away

• Why book accessibility is a fundamental right

• Five reasons an e-book isn't automatically accessible

• Four concrete practices to make books truly usable by everyone

• How technology and editorial processes can work together

The numbers behind accessible reading

According to the World Health Organization, over 2.2 billion people worldwide live with some form of vision impairment, mild or severe.

And books? The World Blind Union has spoken for years of a "book famine" to describe the phenomenon: historically, less than 10% of works published globally have been available in an accessible format.

The Marrakesh Treaty was created specifically to break this imbalance, but the transition to natively accessible publishing is still underway.

5 reasons an e-book isn't automatically an accessible book

There's a common misconception: that digital, on its own, has already solved the problem of book accessibility. If it's in electronic format, many reason, then by definition it's more usable than a print book. In the daily reality of people who read with a screen reader, a magnifier, or text-to-speech software, things look different.

An e-book can be perfectly inaccessible. Some seemingly harmless — and sometimes even useful — choices, like a copy-protection layer, a PDF exported in a rush, or an image left without a description, turn a digital file into a wall. Here's where, usually, the chain breaks.

Scanned PDFs: images, not text

The most frequent and most insidious case is the university or school textbook distributed as a PDF obtained by scanning a paper book. At a glance, it looks like a digital document. In reality, every page is an image, and a screen reader has nothing to read when it encounters an image.

A solution exists, and it's Optical Character Recognition (OCR), but it needs to be applied with care. Poor-quality OCR returns garbled words, illegible formulas, and footnotes that blend into the body text. The result is a file that appears to work but turns out to be unusable once you actually start reading.

• Get support for PDF remediation

• or Learn how to create a accessible PDFs

Restrictive DRM: protection that blocks assistive tools

Digital Rights Management (DRM) exists to protect copyright, but in practice it can also block people who read perfectly legitimately — just with non-traditional tools. Some DRM systems prevent screen readers from reading the text, stop other assistive software from interacting with the file, or limit the number of conversions possible.

The result is almost paradoxical: the book was purchased legitimately, but it can't be used. The protection designed to safeguard the work ends up excluding the very people who want to access it.

Missing semantic structure and bookmarks: a book without a map

A well-designed book has a structure — titles, chapters, subsections, notes, captions — and in an accessible e-book, this structure needs to be made explicit through semantic tags. Without tags, everything becomes a single indistinct block of text: assistive software can no longer tell a title from a paragraph, or a footnote from a quote.

Add to this an often-overlooked element: bookmarks and navigable tables of contents. In a well-designed PDF, bookmarks let you jump directly to a specific point in the document. The same goes for an EPUB with a structured index.

When these are missing, people who read with assistive technologies are forced to scroll line by line to find content. For a student preparing for an exam, this translates into hours of extra work.

Images without alt text: content that stays invisible

Charts, formulas, maps, diagrams, and photographs are often the heart of a study book. In an accessible e-book, every image should be accompanied by alt text that describes its content clearly and in a way that's relevant to the surrounding discussion.

When alt text is missing, entire parts of the book become invisible to people reading with a screen reader. And these are rarely decorative details: diagrams, formulas, and maps are exactly what carry meaning, especially in scientific and technical texts.

Rigid layouts: text that can't be adapted

People who need to enlarge text, increase line spacing, change contrast, or use a high-legibility font should be able to do so without breaking the layout.

Fixed-layout formats — many PDFs, poorly designed e-books, pages exported as images — don't allow these adjustments.

The reader is forced to adapt to the book, when it should be the other way around. And when adaptation isn't possible, reading simply becomes too complex to sustain.

How to make books truly usable by everyone

Accessibility is an editorial practice that starts long before print or export and continues well beyond. Here are four directions worth investing in.

Start with open, interoperable formats

EPUB 3 is today's reference standard for accessible digital publishing. It offers native support for semantic structure, alt text, chapter navigation, text-to-speech, and compatibility with the main assistive technologies. PDF, by nature, was born as a print format, and needs careful design — adding semantic tags, text alternatives, and reading order — to become truly usable.

The choice of format isn't neutral. When a publisher releases a book in compliant EPUB 3, they're already doing half the accessibility work.

Treat accessibility as an ongoing practice

The most widespread approach today is still remediation: publish the book, and then — if someone asks — produce an accessible version. This model has two problems.

1. The first is that it creates structural delays for people who need the book now.

2. The second is that it costs much more, because redoing a text is always more expensive than doing it right the first time.

The alternative is accessibility by design: designing from the start with every reader in mind. That means editorial workflows that build in accessibility at every stage — writing, layout, review, and final file remediation.

Involve the people who experience assistive reading every day

Something we often say at Accessiway is that lived experience can't be replaced by any checklist.

People who use screen readers, Braille displays, magnification software, or text-to-speech every day know where pages break, where navigation gets stuck, where a technical term lacks context.

Involving the community in producing and testing books is the most effective way to understand whether a text truly works.

Verify before publishing

Standards like the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1, 2.2 AA and EN 301 549 offer verifiable criteria for digital text content too.

Automated tools exist to check PDFs, EPUBs, and web content, and they identify the most common digital barriers. Then there's expert manual review, which is essential for catching what tools miss.

A verification cycle that combines automation and a human eye, before distribution, prevents recalls, emergency alternative versions, and — above all — the exclusion of people who need the book now.

When a book isn't accessible, access to a right stops: the international framework

Reading seems like a personal matter. In reality, in schools and universities, it's a public infrastructure. Without usable books, there's no usable education.

• The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, in Article 24, establishes education as a right without exceptions.

• The Marrakesh Treaty, which came into force in 2016 and was adopted by the European Union through Directive 2017/1564, requires signatory states to make books available in accessible formats for people with visual impairments or other reading difficulties.

The legal framework, in short, exists. The problem is that it often stops at the cover. In practice, for thousands of students with visual impairments, dyslexia, or motor disabilities, that right starts to break down right at the textbook. And when it does, we're not talking about a technical inconvenience: we're talking about a fundamental right that's interrupted.

Beyond World Book Day

A world day serves to bring attention to important topics. What's needed afterward, though, is practice. Because on April 24, students with visual impairments or dyslexia will return to the classroom with the same textbooks as today.

Three things we take away from this day:

• Book accessibility is a right, not an option. International conventions, like the UN Convention and the Marrakesh Treaty, set the direction. The work ahead is turning theory into practice.

• The difference is made by the process, not the individual file. Truly accessible books come from editorial workflows designed for everyone, not from post-publication remediation.

• People with lived experience are part of the solution. Involving them in testing and design shortens timelines and raises quality.

And a fourth worth adding: technology alone isn't enough. It needs to work together with expertise, processes, and listening. When these three elements come together, the book stops being a barrier and goes back to being what it should be — a doorway to education, for everyone.

Want to go deeper into the accessibility of digital content?

If you work in publishing, in education, or manage digital platforms that distribute texts and documents, accessibility is a practice you can build into your workflows right away, one step at a time.

Discover how Accessiway can support your journey: from auditing existing content to designing inclusive editorial workflows, and training your teams.

Because accessibility is a right.

Especially in a classroom.

Everything you need to know about accessible books

What makes a book truly accessible?

A book is accessible when it uses an open format like EPUB 3, has a semantic structure with titles and chapters, alt text for images, bookmark-based navigation, and a layout that adapts to the reader's needs.

Is an e-book always accessible?

No, an e-book isn't automatically accessible: a scanned PDF remains an image that screen readers can't interpret, Digital Rights Management (DRM) can block assistive technologies, and images without alt text stay invisible.

What's the best format for accessible books?

EPUB 3 is the reference standard for accessible digital publishing: it natively supports semantic structure, alt text, chapter navigation, and compatibility with screen readers and Braille displays.

How do you design accessible books from the start?

Accessibility by design means embedding accessibility throughout the editorial workflow: choosing open formats like EPUB 3, adding semantic structure and alt text, and involving people with lived experience in testing.