Making content accessible
Posted on 22nd May, 2025
The European European Accessibility Act (EAA) comes into force in June 2025. Angela Thompson, UCL Press Production Editor, writes about a recent training course that she attended, and the recent changes that UCL Press has implemented to make content more accessible.
I recently attended a training course on Accessibility and Publishing, run on behalf of the IPG (Independent Publishers Guild) by Simon Mellins, a publishing industry accessibility expert. With the European Accessibility Act (EAA) coming into force in June 2025, the course was well attended by a wide variety of publishers keen to ensure they understood the implications of the Act and how to ensure their digital content meets the requirements outlined by this important legislation.
In terms of how the EAA impacts the publishing sector, the Act requires that various types of products and services, including e-books and e-readers, are accessible to all. It aims to remove barriers to content, and to ensure that users with disabilities are not disadvantaged. Importantly, it gives readers the power to demand that publishers make materials accessible.
The course gave clarity to what the EAA – and accessibility in publishing more generally – means in practice. That is, content needs to: work well with assistive technology; have a flexible and dynamic layout; provide alternative renditions of content (for example, alternative text descriptions for images); and have accessible metadata and e-commerce.
The course was usefully structured around these key areas, with a detailed session on drawing up alternative text for images. The training concluded with a session focused on strategy and how to implement the EAA requirements on a practical level across an entire publishing programme.
Whilst meeting the requirements of the EAA is not without its challenges, much of the training reinforced and clarified our approach at UCL Press, rather than presenting any surprises or concerns. For example, we are now including alternative text as standard for all new titles, and have a programme underway to draw this up for our backlist. We have accessibility guidelines in place for our authors to follow, and we are addressing our metadata to ensure accessible features of a publication are communicated through the supply chain. Other accessibility requirements, such the need for content to be easy to navigate, including clear headings and a logical structure, should be at the heart of all good publishing, not just in relation to addressing the EAA. However, the discussion on this certainly helped focus the mind on the importance of well-organised, well-written content for all readers.
As well as addressing challenges, the course focused on opportunities; not least that bringing content accessibility to the forefront of what we do ensures wider dissemination and new readerships, but also that this ‘semantically rich’ content is ideally placed to meet the requirements of new technologies, future platform changes, and of course any future legislative changes.
The key takeaway is not to panic, and to draw up a realistic plan that works towards making all content accessible, and to have a clear and timely procedure in place for dealing with accessibility requests as they arise. We will certainly ensure we have all this in place at UCL Press in readiness for the EAA.