EPUB3 Accessibility Remediation: What Elsevier-Affiliated and Independent Dutch Publishers Need to Know

 



The European Accessibility Act is no longer a deadline on the horizon, it’s been in force since June 2025, and the EPUB files in your catalogue are either compliant or they’re a liability.

For publishers based in the Netherlands, home to Elsevier’s global headquarters and a dense network of academic and STM publishers, this isn’t an abstract compliance exercise. It’s a backlist problem. Most publishers have years, sometimes decades, of EPUB titles that were never built with WCAG 2.1 AA in mind.

Here’s what remediation actually involves, and where most projects get stuck.

It’s not just alt text. The most common misconception we run into is that accessibility remediation means adding image descriptions and calling it done. Real EPUB3 remediation covers reading order, navigation landmarks, semantic structure, MathML for equations, and table markup, all of which require someone to actually understand the original content, not just run it through an automated checker.

Metadata is half the job. A remediated EPUB that doesn’t declare its accessibility through proper schema.org metadata, and isn’t reflected in the ONIX feed sent to retailers and libraries, often still shows up as “non-compliant” to procurement systems. We’ve seen publishers do the remediation work correctly and still fail audits because this second half never happened.

Backlist scale is the real challenge. Remediating one title is straightforward. Remediating a catalogue of hundreds is where most internal teams run out of capacity, not expertise, capacity. This is precisely the kind of work we handle at scale for STM and academic publishers across the EU, combining automated detection with manual editorial review so the fixes are accurate, not just checkbox-complete.

If your team has started an accessibility audit and isn’t sure what to do with the results, or hasn’t started one yet, that’s the conversation worth having now. Get in touch with Wordium’s accessibility team for a no-obligation EPUB audit, we’ll tell you exactly where your catalogue stands and what remediation at scale would actually look like.

Wordium provides end-to-end EPUB3 accessibility remediation, from file-level WCAG 2.1 AA compliance to schema.org and ONIX metadata alignment, for STM and academic publishers across Europe.



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