Do Your Ebooks Fail Millions of Readers?

Note: This is part of a series:

Part 1: Do Your Ebooks Fail Millions of Readers?
Part 2: Headings Give Screen Readers a Map of Your Book

Publishing has a problem that we don’t talk about much: accessible ebooks.

Millions of readers open an ebook and can’t read it. Not because the writing is bad or the subject is uninteresting, but because the file itself was built in a way that excludes them.

According to the World Health Organization, over 2.2 billion people worldwide live with some form of vision impairment. In the United States alone, roughly 7 million people have a visual disability significant enough to affect daily reading.

Add readers who rely on screen readers due to dyslexia, cognitive differences, or motor impairments that make physical page-turning difficult, and the number of people who need accessible books grows fast. These readers are not edge cases. They are your audience.

And publishing, largely, is failing them.

The publishing world has operated on the assumption that accessibility is someone else’s problem. Large traditional publishers outsource EPUB conversion to vendors who use automated tools, check a few boxes, and ship files that technically open but function poorly for screen reader users. Indie authors and small publishers inherit those same broken workflows, often without knowing it.

According to the World Blind Union, fewer than 10% of all published materials can be read by people who are blind or have low vision — a figure the Accessible Books Consortium has cited as a core driver of its work. That statistic is more than a decade old, and while it’s improving, it’s doing so slowly — largely due to external pressure, including European Union legislation, legal complaints in the United States, and advocacy from organizations like Bookshare and the National Federation of the Blind.

The problem isn’t a lack of solutions. The tools to build accessible ebooks exist. The knowledge to use them exists. What has been missing is the expectation that publishers, at any scale, should use them — and that expectation is no longer optional. The European Accessibility Act, which came into force in June 2025, requires ebooks sold in EU member states to meet accessibility standards. In the U.S., the Americans with Disabilities Act has been applied to digital content in court cases going back years. If you publish and distribute ebooks, you are operating in a legal landscape that increasingly treats accessibility as an expectation — and in some markets, a requirement.

But compliance is the floor, not the ceiling.

Simply put: accessible books are better books — for everyone. They’re more discoverable, more broadly usable, and built with a structural integrity that benefits every reader, not only those using assistive technology. Build it well for one reader, and you’ve built it well for all of them.

Originally published at https://wickedlanternstudio.com/accessible-ebooks-publishing-guide/ in February 2026.