Interview with 2026 ABC International Excellence Award Winner, CEO Irene Enriques

James Taylor (JT): Tell us about Zanichelli in a few words.

Irene Enriques: Zanichelli is an Italian educational publisher founded in 1859, headquartered in Bologna. We publish school and university textbooks, dictionaries and professional references, over 2,000 titles in total: just to give you an idea of the scale, one in four school textbooks sold in Italy is a Zanichelli book. In recent years we've been expanding significantly into digital products, from ebooks to learning platforms, serving students and teachers across Italy.

JT: What drove Zanichelli to engage in accessibility?

We wanted everyone to be able to study, and we needed to be compliant. Creating an accessible digital product means giving everyone the opportunity to access knowledge in an easier way than in the past.

JT: Were there any particular challenges you faced?

The biggest challenge was cultural, not technical. Making accessibility shift from extraordinary to ordinary, that requires a genuine shift in mindset. We moved carefully, trying to bring people along rather than simply asking them to comply.

This shift hasn't fully happened in society: people still say "well done for thinking about this", as if accessibility were an act of generosity, something exceptional. When in reality, enabling people to study and learn is the most ordinary thing a publisher can do.

We have also overcome technological challenges. The main one was the provision of alternative descriptions for images. We made use of artificial intelligence, whilst respecting copyright. The cost of alt text is now fixed at just a few tens of euros. Without AI, the investment would have been probably prohibitive.

Secondly, our ebooks used to have a fixed layout. We made a significant investment (around 1.700.000 euro) in creating fluid-layout ebooks and converting our catalogue. As we continue to produce fixed-layout ebooks as well, our ebook production costs have roughly doubled. Nevertheless, if we consider all the set-up costs for producing new titles (both print and ebooks), the cost of producing ebooks is still a fairly small percentage, having risen from 3,7% to 7,5%.

Furthermore, we invested around 300.000 euros for the accessibility of our online platforms.

JT: How does it feel to receive the ABC International Excellence Award?

One of the most foundational documents in the field of accessibility is the Marrakesh Treaty, created by WIPO. It was a milestone. A real one. So being recognised by WIPO, the very institution behind that treaty, fills us with great pride and a deep sense of responsibility.

Because accessibility is still, in many ways, an uncertain territory. The World Wide Web Consortium works hard to develop guidelines for accessible EPUBs and digital formats, but much of the landscape remains unstandardised. Vendors check for accessibility issues but don't always explain how to fix them. Answers can be unclear. There are no established practices for everything: only attempts, ideas, conversations, brainstorming sessions, and the slow, patient work of understanding what users actually need. Inviting them into our offices. Listening to them. Trying again.

For people who work in technology, this can be uncomfortable. Developers are trained to follow clear specifications, well established standards. In accessibility, many of those steps were taken in the dark, without knowing whether the direction was right because of the lack of standardization.

This recognition from WIPO is a meaningful confirmation that the work done - often without established precedents, building practices from the ground up - was moving in the right direction.

JT: Do you have any advice for other publishers who are working to make their books more accessible?

We believe it is worth investing in processes: these are substantial investments, but they improve workflows even independently of accessibility and bring us closer to a "digital first" approach (which we have not yet achieved).

And then, of course, values do matter. You can teach almost anything, methodologies, tools, code, but you cannot teach passion. Passion is either there or it isn't. The advice to companies may be simple: find the person who already has it. Everything else will follow.

We were fortunate to be able to entrust a large part of the work to a researcher driven by genuine passion, Milena Risi, as part of a European PhD program funded by Next Generation EU.

Irene Enriques is one of the CEOs of Zanichelli Holding and of Zanichelli Editore. She holds a degree in Mathematics from the University of Bologna. After a brief experience in the Software Division of Houghton Mifflin in Boston, she joined Zanichelli in 1992. She has worked as a mathematics editor, head of an editorial line, and general secretary. In 2006 she succeeded her father as general manager of Zanichelli editore.