EAA Compliance Checker

The European Accessibility Act (Directive 2019/882) is an EU directive that establishes accessibility requirements for products and services. For digital publishers, this means ebooks and digital publications must meet specific accessibility standards to be sold in the European market. The directive aims to improve the functioning of the internal market for accessible products and services by removing barriers created by divergent national rules.

The EAA compliance deadline is June 28, 2025. From this date, all new ebooks and digital publications made available in the EU market must meet the accessibility requirements. Publishers who fail to comply may face restrictions on selling their products in EU member states.

The EAA requires ebooks to be perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust (POUR principles). Specific requirements include: providing text alternatives for images, ensuring proper reading order, supporting navigation, declaring the publication language, providing sufficient color contrast, and making content compatible with assistive technologies like screen readers. Most requirements align with WCAG 2.1 Level AA guidelines.

Ace by DAISY (Accessibility Checker for EPUB) is developed by the DAISY Consortium and tests your EPUB for accessibility compliance. It checks for: alternative text on images, proper heading structure, language declarations, color contrast issues, table accessibility, navigation completeness, and other WCAG guidelines. Ace provides detailed reports with specific locations of issues and remediation guidance.

Your privacy is our priority. Uploaded EPUB files are processed securely in isolated environments and automatically deleted immediately after validation. We do not store, read, or access your content. All file transfers use encrypted connections, and no human reviews your files during the validation process.

Yes, the EAA Compliance Checker is completely free to use. You'll get an instant summary of your validation results. To access the full detailed report with specific issue locations and remediation guidance, we ask you to subscribe to our newsletter. This helps us keep the tool free while keeping you informed about accessibility updates and PubCoder news.

If your EPUB has issues, you'll receive a detailed report showing each problem, its severity, and specific recommendations for fixing it. Many common accessibility issues can be resolved using PubCoder's built-in accessibility tools, which include automatic fixes for problems like missing language declarations, improper heading structure, and images without alt text.