Why accessibility matters now
An accessible ebook is one a reader using a screen reader, a refreshable braille display, or large-print settings can navigate and read in full. As of 2025 the EU Accessibility Act makes born-accessible EPUB a legal requirement for books sold into the EU, and the major retailers are turning accessibility metadata into a listing and ranking signal. It has quietly become a purchasing criterion, not a nice-to-have.
Because Bookshaper builds your EPUB from structured content — real headings, a proper reading order, alt text, and language metadata — accessibility is a property of the export, not a manual retrofit.
What Bookshaper produces
- Accessibility metadata written into the EPUB package — the schema.org accessibility fields retailers read (accessibility summary, access modes, conformance).
- A logical reading order and semantic structure, so assistive technology moves through the book the way a sighted reader would.
- Accessible, dyslexia-friendly body styles — including the bundled Atkinson Hyperlegible face, designed for maximum legibility.
Validate before you publish
Ace by DAISY — the industry-standard EPUB accessibility checker — is a free download. Run it on the exported file and it reports any conformance gaps against the EPUB Accessibility spec, so you can confirm your file is genuinely accessible before you upload it, rather than trusting a checkbox.
Accessibility and print typesetting aren't a trade-off here: the same single source produces a beautifully typeset print PDF and a born-accessible EPUB, so you don't compromise one to get the other.