At the seventy-fifth edition of the Frankfurter Buchmesse, Fondazione LIA gathered several experts around the same table to talk about the “Accessibility Era” that the publishing supply chain is currently experiencing. Indeed, it is less than a year before the European Directive on the Accessibility Requirements for Products and Services (European Accessibility Act) comes into force on June 28, 2025. The entire publishing industry is preparing for this date by adapting its production and distribution flows to ensure digital publications and services are accessible to all readers.

The seminar, organized in the context of the APACE project, aimed to show in concrete terms what it means for a publisher to work with this goal. During the meeting, the case study of the Mondadori Group’s Educational Division was presented and its efforts to adapt its services to international accessibility standards, through a project with several steps of skills acquisition and workflow adaptation.

We asked Alessandra Porcelli (Mondadori Group, Educational Division) to tell us about this path towards accessibility that, also with the support and collaboration of Fondazione LIA, the Group is facing.

Accessibility in Educational Publishing: A Journey Toward 2025

Alessandra Porcelli
Mondadori Group, Educational Division

The approaching date of June 2025, when the European Accessibility Act will come into effect, has prompted the entire publishing industry to devise new workflows, solutions, and processes for the production and distribution of digital content to ensure compliance with accessibility standards.

The Educational Division of Mondadori Group, focusing on the school and academic sectors  – including Mondadori Education, Rizzoli Education, and Deascuola – began its journey toward accessibility at the beginning of 2023. Adapting to new accessibility standards across a vast annual production (about 600 school volumes and 200,000 pages) managed through industrialized workflows, has introduced technological challenges in a field where project design, graphics, and complexity of educational activities are at their peak. Our goal, in a “from print to digital” process, has always been to preserve the user experience of the printed book while finding solutions to make the complex features, typical of schoolbooks, accessible.

To start our work on accessibility, we set up a project team with clear role definitions and governance, having identified the necessary expertise: project management, R&D, InDesign, pre-press, ebook production and digital assets, management of the digital platform and reader solution. From the outset, we chose to work alongside Fondazione LIA, given its extensive and international experience in accessibility.

Our journey began with an audit of ebooks and our proprietary platform Hub Scuola to identify gaps towards the new requirements. In parallel, we provided internal training to foster a culture of accessibility that extends not only to technical roles but also to management, as the EAA impacts the overall strategy of publishing houses.

The most intense phase involved identifying solutions to meet requirements, primarily alternative text – not only for describing images and illustrations but also for complex objects. Given the non-standardized nature of our production in terms of graphics and layout, we conducted a comprehensive mapping of our books to ensure all possible cases were covered in our tagging system. We then established a new set of rules for pre-press suppliers and identified requirements for the development of our new HTML format and reader solution.

In 2025, our new accessible digital ecosystem will be launched, encompassing ebooks, the reader solution, our digital platform, websites, and eCommerce. The EAA has provided an opportunity to revise our workflows, making them more efficient and consistent, bringing benefits beyond accessibility objectives. This has undoubtedly been a significant effort, requiring a well-structured team, and has led us to explore new partnerships and technological solutions, supported by research from our R&D department.

Finally, we defined our roadmap, with a two-step implementation plan: more cautious workflows in 2025 and the adoption of more integrated processes in 2026. After all, this project will not end in 2025: technology evolves, and we must evolve along with it.