The first European Accessibility Summer School took place on June 26-27, 2025, a two-days event organized in the framework of APACE, a project funded by the European Union, where publishing professionals, accessibility experts and key stakeholders came together to explore key aspects of accessibility in publishing.

The timing was no coincidence: the event was held just ahead of the European Accessibility Act (EAA) coming into force on June 28th, underscoring that legislation is only the beginning of a longer journey. Across two days of rich dialogue, the programme blended cutting-edge best practices with critical reflections on the challenges that remain and the solutions still to be built.

Among the many panels and roundtables exploring themes like production, distribution, and the role of libraries and aggregators, one standout session was “Nobody Puts Accessibility in a Corner”, a live interview by Elisa Molinari, Project manager of APACE, with Gregorio Pellegrino, Chief Accessibility Officer at Fondazione LIA. Pellegrino is a leading voice in accessible publishing and co-editor of several key documents, including the W3C EPUB Accessibility 1.1, the Accessibility Metadata Display Guide for Digital Publications 2.0, and the EPUB Accessibility – EU Accessibility Act Mapping. He is also the technical lead of the DAISY Consortium’s “Accessible EPUB from InDesign Expert Group” working with Adobe to enhance the accessibility of EPUBs exported from InDesign.

The interview

Looking back at the last five years, what achievements are you most proud of?

As a co-editor, I’m especially proud of our work on EPUB Accessibility 1.1, the Metadata Display Guide 2.0, and the EPUB Accessibility – EU Accessibility Act Mapping, showing how standards development has been coordinated across the entire supply chain.

Broadly speaking, one of the most important achievements has been the development of a coordinated ecosystem across the publishing supply chain. Organizations have come together to align specifications for content creators, distributors, retailers, and reading systems, all converging in time for EAA compliance.

Additionally, innovation in the sector is now increasingly driven by accessibility, not treated as an afterthought.

What is your opinion on EPUB Fixed Layout? Do you think it earned a place in the accessible publishing world?

At the time of speaking, there are no complete guidelines on how to make EPUB Fixed Layout fully accessible.

Fixed Layout format inherently conflicts with key accessibility requirements, especially the reflowable success criterion of WCAG. While best practices like using alt-text and structured reading order are possible, they do not allow to achieve full conformance.

Fondazione LIA made one of the first “as-accessible-as-possible” fixed layout two years ago; it was a research and development project for an Italian publisher: edizioni Sonda. In parallel I see some promising experiments, like those from EDRLab, are exploring ways to generate reflowable versions from well-structured Fixed Layout EPUBs. We are at an early stage: though there are improvement, the experimentation is still in progress.

What do you think is coming next in the world of publishing standards over the next five years?

I think that for what concerns the publication per se, we have already reached the peak with EPUB 3.3 and now working with EPUB 3.4.

The focus now is on standardizing best practices around common elements used in e-books for a better user experience, and on creating some comprehensive guidelines for EPUB creators.

Standards are important, but in practice, it is the tools that users rely on. There have been several recent developments, could you provide an update on the activities of the Accessible EPUB from InDesign Expert Group?

The InDesign Expert Group is a small group of experts including my-self as technical leader, Richard Orme form DAISY Consortium, Jonas Lillqvist from Celia, and Laura Brady form eBOUND Canada. It provides consistent, monthly consultation to Adobe, demonstrating the accessibility community’s commitment to systemic change.

Over the years, we’ve seen workflow improvement. Today, simple to medium-complexity books can be produced as accessible reflowable EPUBs from InDesign with reduced post-export work, if the work is correctly done in the software. We are currently working toward further improvement in reducing remediation, including figure captions, full tables support and advanced features like DPUB ARIA roles for enriched semantics.

An important side effect of our work is that improvements, like the creation of the page list, are now enabled by default in InDesign export, meaning that even EPUB creators not specifically focused on accessibility if using the tool in the correct way and the adequate knowledge may produce more accessible EPUBs.

How has the Accessibility Metadata Display Guide 2.0 changed the process of delivering accessible books to readers?

This guide answers a simple question: How can we make accessibility metadata clear and useful to readers?

With a group of editors, coordinated by Avneesh Singh from DAISY Consortium and including Charles LaPierre (Benetech), Gautier Chomel (EDRLab ), George Kerscher (DAISY Consortium) and Christopher Saynor (EDItEUR), and continuous feedback from the community, we created guidelines that work both with EPUB Accessibility Metadata and with the ONIX standard, and can support organizations to deliver consistent accessibility information across all platforms.

Two important aspects need to be highlighted: it’s a user-centered work, shaped on the feedback of end users collected by focus groups, and it is cross-platform consistent, meaning that if someone is looking for an ebook on different platforms, if the owner adopted the guidelines he or she will find nearly the same information about accessibility.

A great achievement is the adoption of these guidelines by important players in the digital publishing sector – like Amazon and Vitalsource. This demonstrates how important a systemic and coordinated approach is for the industry. The LIA catalogue is one of the first concrete implementation: all the accessible titles created by the Italian publishers and certified by LIA show all the metadata in line with the guidelines. We have also created a set of icons for all the metadata and to promote the consistent adoption by other organizations we will make them available to interested parties.

Accessibility is finally getting the spotlight it deserves, but the road has not been all smooth. In your opinion, what has been the highlight of this recent momentum, and what has been the facepalm moment?

The EAA has clearly accelerated change. We’re now seeing companies budgeting for accessibility, even outside publishing, a shift that was unthinkable five years ago.

On the downside, we still face metadata chaos, where EPUBs and PDFs are given identical ISBNs (and so associated the same accessibility metadata) despite vastly different accessibility features.

There’s also a recurring habit of “starting from scratch,” where organizations reinvent solutions instead of building on existing standards. And reliance only on automated tools to claim accessibility compliance, which only detect about 30% of accessibility issues, remains a common misunderstanding and a big problem for end users who will find e-books that claim to be accessible and may not be.

Lastly, the tendency to look for shortcuts with accessibility overlays for websites that still falsely promise full compliance. (Read why overlay are not a solution: Accessibility Overlay. Can they make a site fully accessible?)

How are libraries responding to the accessibility push?

Libraries are now starting to work seriously with accessibility metadata through initiatives like the IFLA Accessibility Working Group, which I am part of. We are working on trying to understand how to manage accessibility metadata in library metadata standards. However, integrating accessibility metadata into systems like MARC, remains a technical hurdle.

Moreover, librarians are not fully aware of accessibility effort done by the publishers. In most cases librarians lack access to the file, preventing them from verifying publishers’ accessibility metadata.

What about reading apps and DRM?

Reading apps have improved over recent years, thanks in large part to DAISY-led initiatives like epubests.org where reading solutions are systematically tested – even if the full accessibility is still to come in many cases. The future focus will be shifting to making complex features accessible (like annotations, highlights, extended descriptions, etc.) and enriching “basic” features like text-to-speech with more sophisticated capabilities.

DRM ecosystem has also seen change. The EAA helped a lot, prompting a shift away from restrictive DRM systems in favour of accessibility-compatible DRM solutions like Readium LCP, which adoption is increasing year by year.

Readers with print impairments have been at the heart of accessibility efforts. Looking at where we are today, what is the biggest achievement and what are we still missing?

We know that thanks to the work we do daily, readers with print impairments can navigate a table correctly, can study “like everyone else”, and can correctly navigate platforms and apps and this has a real impact on people’s lives and is to me the biggest achievement.

In general, the greatest milestone will be to fully achieve the transition from specialized formats to born-accessible content, benefiting all users from the outset.

Accessibility is a paradigm shift for everybody and also end users need to be involved and informed of the changes and the possibilities. The biggest effort in the next years will be effectively communicating to end users which accessibility features are available in both applications and e-books, so they can fully leverage mainstream content that is now natively accessible.

One wish, no limits: what would you ask for?

A highly intelligent system that can automate semantic tagging, reading order, and complex layout processing, plus fully automated quality assurance for accessible e-books. Will it ever exist?

This interview was conducted in the framework of APACE, co-founded by the European Union