Standards - EPUBs

EPUB Accessibility 1.1 addresses two key needs in the EPUB ecosystem:

• evaluation and certification of accessible EPUB Publications;

• discovery of the accessible qualities of EPUB Publications.

This specification sets formal requirements to meet to certify content as accessible, and provides Authors a clear set of guidelines to evaluate their content against, and allow certification of quality. It is designed to be applicable to EPUB Publications that conform to any version or profile, including future versions of the standard.

An EPUB Publication must meet the following criteria to be accessible per this specification:

• It must meet the requirements for Discoverable EPUB Publications, including providing metadata on accessibility.

• It must meet the requirements for [WCAG 2.0] conformance defined in WCAG Conformance Requirements. This specifies WCAG 2.0 A as mandatory, and AA as recommended.

• It must meet the requirements for EPUB Publications defined in EPUB Requirements. This section covers providing navigation to static page break locations and synchronised text and audio playback.

It must include accessibility conformance metadata as defined in Conformance Reporting. This includes stating which WCAG level (A, AA, AAA) it conforms to, and who provided this certification. 

The following are some helpful training resources on accessible EPUBs:

Publications Office of the European Union - From Adobe InDesign to EPUB