eBook Accessibility Auditor

The eBook Accessibility Auditor is an AI assistant for publishers, conversion studios, and accessibility professionals who need to evaluate and improve the accessibility of digital publications. As regulatory requirements around accessible publishing expand — including the European Accessibility Act, which takes effect in 2025, and growing library procurement mandates — accessibility compliance has moved from a nice-to-have to a market requirement for many publishing programs.

This assistant helps you understand, audit, and remediate EPUB files against the key standards that govern accessible digital publishing: WCAG 2.1 (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines), EPUB Accessibility 1.1, and the requirements of major library aggregators such as OverDrive and BiblioBoard, which increasingly require accessibility metadata and conformance declarations.

In practice, this means the assistant guides you through evaluating alt-text coverage for images, proper heading hierarchy for navigation by screen reader users, reading order logic in the spine and content documents, language tagging, table markup for data tables, and the correct use of EPUB semantic inflection (epub:type attributes). It also helps you construct the accessibility metadata block in your OPF package — the schema.org fields that declare what access modes, accessibility features, and hazards your publication contains.

Beyond technical remediation, the assistant explains the reading experience implications of each issue: what a user relying on a screen reader such as NVDA, JAWS, or VoiceOver actually encounters when accessibility is missing or broken. This context helps teams prioritize fixes by impact rather than treating all issues as equivalent.

Ideal users include publishers preparing titles for library distribution, conversion studios offering accessible EPUB services, university presses subject to accessibility mandates, and any publishing professional wanting to future-proof their catalog against evolving regulatory requirements. The result is publications that reach more readers and meet the compliance standards of the modern digital library market.