On 28 June 2025 the European Accessibility Act started applying to ebooks and e-readers sold in the EU. Most self-published authors either have not heard of it or heard about it as a panic and stopped reading. It is worth twenty minutes, because a novel is the easiest possible case and the work is mostly a declaration you are not currently making.

I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. What follows is what the directive asks for and what it means for a text-only book.

Why a novel is the easy case

Accessibility rules are hard for cookbooks, textbooks and anything where the layout carries meaning. A novel is a sequence of paragraphs. Almost everything the requirements ask for, a properly built EPUB already does:

  • The text is real text, so a screen reader can read it and a reader can resize it. This is the whole ballgame, and it is why a scanned or image-based ebook fails immediately.
  • The reading order is logical, because there is only one.
  • Chapter navigation exists, so a reader can move by chapter rather than by swiping.
  • Nothing flashes.
  • The language is declared, so a screen reader pronounces it correctly.
  • Images, if you have any, carry alt text. For most novels that is the cover and perhaps a map.

If your EPUB does those things, the book itself is in reasonable shape. What is usually missing is the part that tells anyone.

The metadata is the bit people skip

EPUB accessibility metadata is a set of declarations inside the file stating how it can be read: its access modes, the features it has, and any hazards. It is machine readable, and retailers increasingly surface it on the product page, which means a book with no declaration reads as a book with no accessibility rather than a book nobody described.

The W3C publishes a direct mapping from EPUB accessibility to the EAA’s requirements, which is the document to send anyone who tells you this is vague. The DAISY Consortium has the readable version.

Declaring it accurately costs nothing. Declaring it inaccurately is worse than not declaring it, so the only rule that matters is that the metadata describes the file you actually shipped.

The microenterprise exemption

The directive exempts microenterprises, defined as fewer than ten people and annual turnover or balance sheet total not above €2 million, in the circumstances it sets out, and allows a disproportionate burden argument elsewhere. Most self-published authors are comfortably inside that definition.

Two things before you relax. First, the exemption is not a blanket one, and how it applies depends on whether you are the one selling to the reader or your retailer is. Second, there is now a formal EPUB exemption property for declaring that a publication is claiming one, which exists precisely because silently claiming an exemption and silently ignoring the rules look identical from outside.

If real money depends on the answer, ask a lawyer in the relevant country. The EUR-Lex summary is the primary source.

The large-print edition nobody makes

Accessibility for print has no directive behind it and a real market in front of it. A large-print edition is a separate edition set at 16 point or above with looser leading, and libraries buy them.

It is not the same file with the type size raised. Bigger type means fewer words per line, so every line break changes, the page count grows a lot, and justification usually has to give way to ragged right because there is no longer room to distribute the space. It gets its own ISBN, because it is a distinct edition.

Almost no self-published novel has one, which is odd, because the readers who need it are the readers most likely to finish a book.

What Galley does about this

The EPUB export writes the accessibility metadata rather than leaving you to hand edit an OPF file, and the large-print PDF is a menu item rather than a project: the same book, re-set at a readable size with the line breaks recalculated.

Neither of those makes your book compliant on its own, because compliance depends on what you wrote and where you sell it. They remove the excuse that it was too fiddly.

Preview and export · Galley for self-publishing authors · EPUB, print PDF, or both?