Ebook Accessibility: How to Format Your EPUB for Screen Readers and All Readers

Ebook accessibility formatting is the practice of structuring your EPUB file so that readers using assistive technology — screen readers, text-to-speech systems, refreshable Braille displays — can access your book as fully as sighted readers do. For many authors, this is new territory. The good news is that the most important accessibility practices overlap almost entirely with good formatting habits you should already be following.

Approximately 2.2 billion people worldwide have some form of visual impairment. Many are avid readers who rely on screen readers or text-to-speech features to consume ebooks. Beyond that group, many readers with dyslexia, learning differences, or situational limitations (driving, exercising, doing dishes) regularly use text-to-speech. Making your ebook accessible isn't a niche concern — it's a way to reach more readers, and increasingly it's becoming a legal and platform requirement.

This guide covers the core elements of ebook accessibility, how to implement them in your EPUB, and what to do when accessibility requirements conflict with visual design choices.

How screen readers interact with ebooks

Screen readers — software like Apple's VoiceOver, Google's TalkBack, or the NVDA desktop application — interpret the structure of your EPUB and convert it to speech or Braille output. They don't read a visual layout; they read the underlying code in a sequential order.

When a screen reader user opens your ebook, they navigate using the heading structure. Each H1, H2, and H3 in your document becomes a navigation point. A properly structured ebook lets a reader with a screen reader jump directly to Chapter 3 the same way a sighted reader skips ahead by scanning the table of contents. Without proper heading structure, a 400-page book is a single undivided stream of text.

Images without alt text are announced as "image" or "graphic" — or simply skipped — giving the reader no information about what the image contains. Tables without header rows may be read as disconnected cells with no indication of what column each value belongs to. Language metadata that's missing or wrong causes text-to-speech to mispronounce words throughout the book. Every one of these issues has a straightforward fix.

Key accessibility elements

The following table covers the core elements that determine how accessible your EPUB is for assistive technology users.

Element	What it does	Accessibility impact	How to implement
Heading hierarchy (H1–H3)	Marks chapter titles and section headings	Enables navigation by chapter/section	Use semantic heading styles, not just bold text
Alt text for images	Provides text description of visual content	Screen readers read alt text aloud	Add alt attribute to every meaningful image
Logical reading order	Sequence a screen reader follows	Must match visual order to make sense	Ensure HTML source order matches intended flow
Language declaration	Specifies the book's language	Controls text-to-speech pronunciation	Set correct BCP 47 tag in EPUB metadata
Semantic roles (landmarks)	Marks chapter, frontmatter, backmatter	Helps readers navigate between sections	Set EPUB type attributes on structural elements

Getting these five elements right handles the majority of accessibility concerns for a standard prose ebook. More complex books — those with extensive tables, images, or math — require additional attention.

Heading structure: the backbone of accessible navigation

Heading structure matters for every reader, not just those using assistive technology. EPUB reading applications use headings to build the navigation menu (the table of contents that appears in the sidebar of Kindle, Apple Books, and Kobo apps). A book with improperly nested or inconsistently applied headings has a broken navigation menu for everyone.

For accessibility, the rules are:

• H1 should appear once per document or chapter file, used for the chapter title.
• H2 marks major sections within a chapter.
• H3 marks subsections within H2 sections.
• Do not skip heading levels. Going from H2 directly to H4 (with no H3) confuses screen reader navigation and signals structural inconsistency.
• Do not use headings for visual styling. A bold centered paragraph that looks like a heading but isn't tagged as one is invisible to a screen reader's navigation.

In LiberScript and similar formatting tools, heading styles (Chapter Title, Section Header, etc.) automatically map to the correct HTML heading levels in the EPUB output. Using the correct style in your manuscript is all that's required — the tool handles the heading tag in the exported file. See epub formatting best practices for how heading styles translate to EPUB structure.

Writing effective alt text for book images

Alt text is a written description embedded in the image code that screen readers announce in place of the image. Writing good alt text is a skill — it requires you to think about what a reader who cannot see the image needs to know.

What to include:

• The subject and relevant content of the image
• Any text visible in the image (titles, labels, captions within the image itself)
• Context that helps the reader understand what the image is conveying in this part of the book

What to avoid:

• "Image of..." or "Photo of..." — screen readers already announce "image" before reading alt text
• Redundant descriptions that repeat what the surrounding text already says clearly
• Excessively long alt text — aim for one to three sentences for most images

Examples:

Weak: "Chart"

Better: "Bar chart showing monthly sales figures from January to June 2025, with June showing the highest value at approximately 3,400 units."

Weak: "Author photo"

Better: "Black and white portrait of the author standing in front of a bookshelf."

When "decorative" is the right call: Some images are purely decorative — ornamental dividers, textured backgrounds, repeated design elements. These images don't convey information and don't need alt text. In HTML, you indicate this with an empty alt attribute (alt=""), which tells screen readers to skip the image entirely rather than announcing "image." See drop caps and ornamental elements for how decorative elements should be handled in EPUB.

Cover image alt text

The cover image is a special case. Most formatting tools place the cover as the first page of the EPUB. The standard format for cover alt text is:

"Cover of [Book Title] by [Author Name]"

For example: "Cover of The Quiet Hours by Sarah Monteiro."

That's sufficient. The cover is an identifier, not an image that carries complex meaning requiring lengthy description. If the cover design includes a tagline or subtitle, you can include that: "Cover of The Quiet Hours: A Novel by Sarah Monteiro."

Tables in ebooks: keeping them accessible

Tables are one of the more challenging elements in accessible ebooks. A screen reader reads a table cell by cell, which only makes sense if the reader understands which column each cell belongs to. Properly marked up tables include a header row where each column is labeled, and that header label is programmatically associated with the cells below it.

In practice, for ebook production:

• Keep tables as simple as possible. Two or three columns are far more accessible than eight.
• Always include a header row, and ensure your formatting tool marks it as a header row (not just a bold-styled row).
• Avoid merged cells — they create structural ambiguity that's difficult for assistive technology to interpret.
• For very complex tables in nonfiction or academic work, consider whether the same information could be conveyed as a list or broken into multiple simpler tables.

Complex tables sometimes work better as images with detailed alt text than as table markup, especially in EPUB 2 where table accessibility support is limited. This is a trade-off: sighted readers see a well-formatted table, and screen reader users receive the alt text description of its contents.

The reflowable format as an accessibility advantage

One of the most significant accessibility features of EPUB ebooks is already built in: reflowable text. Unlike a PDF (which has a fixed layout), a reflowable EPUB lets readers adjust the reading experience to their needs:

• Font size: Readers can increase text size significantly without affecting layout
• Font family: Many reading apps allow switching to dyslexia-friendly fonts like OpenDyslexic
• Line spacing and margins: Adjustable in most apps for readers who benefit from more white space
• Color and contrast: High contrast and dark mode options are available in all major reading apps
• Text-to-speech: Built into iOS, Android, and most e-readers without requiring a separate screen reader

These features exist in any reflowable EPUB regardless of how it was formatted, but they work best in EPUBs with clean, semantic structure. A badly structured EPUB can interfere with font-size scaling, break navigation, or cause text-to-speech to read page elements in the wrong order.

EPUB 3 vs. EPUB 2 accessibility improvements

EPUB 3 introduced substantial improvements to accessibility support compared to EPUB 2. The differences that matter most for indie authors:

Feature	EPUB 2	EPUB 3
Semantic roles (landmarks)	Limited	Full epub:type attribute support
Media overlays (synchronized audio)	Not supported	Supported
MathML (math notation)	Not supported	Supported
Language declaration	Basic	Improved BCP 47 support
Navigation document	NCX only	EPUB nav document (more structured)
Reading system support	Universal	Nearly universal (2026)

For most indie authors publishing prose fiction or standard nonfiction, the practical difference between EPUB 2 and EPUB 3 is modest for accessibility purposes. The core elements — alt text, heading structure, language metadata — work in both versions. EPUB 3 is the current standard and the format most major platforms prefer. LiberScript exports EPUB 3 by default.

Testing your ebook's accessibility

Before uploading your ebook, you can check its accessibility without specialized knowledge using a few straightforward methods.

Ace by DAISY: The Ace accessibility checker (available free from the DAISY Consortium) analyzes your EPUB file and reports accessibility issues with explanations. It flags missing alt text, heading structure problems, missing language declarations, and more. It's the closest thing to an automated accessibility audit for EPUB files.

Reading app testing: Open your EPUB in Kindle for iOS or Android and activate the device's built-in text-to-speech. Listen to the opening pages, navigate between chapters using the table of contents, and check whether images are handled sensibly. This gives you a real-world sense of the screen reader experience without specialized hardware.

Apple Books verification: Apple Books enforces accessibility standards more actively than most platforms. If your EPUB passes Apple Books' ingestion (delivered through Findaway, Draft2Digital, or direct upload), it's a reasonable signal that basic accessibility requirements are met.

How accessibility requirements are evolving

Accessibility requirements for digital publishing are moving from best practice to legal obligation in several markets. The European Accessibility Act (EAA), which took effect in June 2025 across EU member states, includes ebook accessibility requirements for publishers and distributors. Authors selling into EU markets through major platforms should be aware that their platform partners are increasingly responsible for ensuring accessible content — and that responsibility can flow upstream to the content creator.

Apple Books has been among the more proactive platforms in communicating accessibility expectations to publishers and has updated its content guidelines to reflect accessibility standards. Amazon Kindle has accessibility support built into its apps and Kindle hardware but has been less prescriptive about content requirements.

The practical implication for indie authors: the effort to meet current accessibility best practices is modest, and the benefit — reaching more readers, future-proofing against evolving platform requirements — is real. See epub metadata guide for the language declaration and other metadata fields that support accessibility.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need to make my ebook accessible by law?

It depends on where you're selling and what scale you operate at. The European Accessibility Act applies to ebooks sold in the EU and includes obligations for publishers and distributors, with some exemptions for very small businesses (microenterprises). In the US, accessibility law for digital publishing is less settled, but platforms like Apple Books are independently enforcing accessibility standards. The safest position is to implement baseline accessibility practices — they're low effort and benefit all readers.

What's the minimum I should implement for accessibility?

If you implement only a few things, prioritize: (1) correct language declaration in your EPUB metadata, (2) consistent heading structure using proper heading styles rather than manually formatted text, and (3) alt text for any meaningful images. These three changes handle the most common accessibility failures and require minimal additional effort if your manuscript is already formatted with consistent styles.

Does adding accessibility change how the ebook looks to regular readers?

No. Accessibility improvements are in the EPUB's underlying code structure — they're invisible to readers who aren't using assistive technology. Adding alt text doesn't change what sighted readers see. Using proper heading styles (rather than just making text bold and centered) produces the same visual result with better structural integrity underneath.

How do I add alt text to images in my formatting workflow?

It depends on your tool. In LiberScript, you can add alt text to images when inserting them into your manuscript. In Microsoft Word, right-click any image and select "Edit Alt Text." In Affinity Publisher or InDesign, the alt text field is in the image frame properties. If your tool doesn't support alt text, you can add it manually by editing the EPUB's HTML files after export — the attribute is alt="your description here" on the <img> tag.

The bottom line

Ebook accessibility formatting is one of those areas where the effort is low and the benefit is disproportionately large. Implementing proper heading structure, meaningful alt text for images, and correct language metadata takes an hour or less on most manuscripts — and produces an ebook that works for all your readers, not just the majority.

As accessibility requirements evolve across platforms and markets, authors who've already implemented these practices will have nothing to change. Authors who haven't will face retrofitting work on a longer backlist. Starting with accessible formatting is simply the right call.

LiberScript handles the structural elements of EPUB accessibility automatically — correct heading levels, navigation document, language metadata — so your focus can stay on the content-specific elements like alt text. Get started to format your next ebook, or see pricing to find the right plan.