Compliance Isn’t Access: Highlights from our IPA Congress Panel

The congress was a fantastic event with a clear focus on the impact of AI, sustainability, and freedom to publish work, but we managed to slip in a conversation about accessibility and the future of accessible publishing. Chaired by Karine Pansa from Grupo Girassol Brasil, the panel "The Next Frontier of Accessibility" featured the work of Agata Mrva-Montoya (Australia), Laura Brady (Canada), and Nor Afifah Shabani from Edote Sdn Bhd (Malaysia).

AI - Genuine Tool or Automation Trap?

Publishing stands at a genuine inflection point. Metadata, accessible content, and accessible reading systems are converging to make it easier than ever to produce accessible books and to reach readers that need them.

There is an opportunity to transform the industry from a default print-first to genuinely multiformat publishing - expanding the audience rather than treating accessibility as a compliance add-on. Realizing that opportunity, however, depends on accessibility being a part of everyone's job - publishers, editors, production staff, in addition to sales, marketing and publicity. If it's not a part of everyone's remit, then it's siloed, eventually leading to less effective, and often transient, outcomes.

This is precisely where the choice about AI matters. Used thoughtlessly to slash costs and turbocharge productivity, AI would simply reproduce the compliance mindset in faster form. But using AI for accessibility - to help publishers create well-rounded, accessible content that serves all kinds of readers - is a great use case.

AI-assisted alt-text creation, automated PDF remediation, faster format-shifting: this could finally close the gap between what's legally required and what's actually produced. Used well, AI can help make "born-accessible" and "broadly usable" content achievable, serving readers who have historically been left out of print-first publishing. We can put it to work for us in intelligent ways to make more content accessible to more people rather than letting it drain creativity from how we publish.

The significant risk, however, is that we can use that same capacity to automate our way to a checklist. If "born-accessible" becomes "AI-generated and unchecked" - we've just built a faster route to the same exclusion. The core danger is that AI and technology in general makes it really easy to ask the wrong question: "Did the file pass the checker?" is a compliance question. "Can a reader with print disability actually use it well?" is an access question. You can generate alt text with AI and run the file through Ace by DAISY. It comes back clean and it feels like the job is done. But a technically valid file and a genuinely readable one are very different things.

Using AI for accessibility isn't inherently a problem. But it does require permission, respect for copyright, and transparency with readers about where and how it's been used. Tools like DAISY's Fido, which can help with writing image descriptions, marking up language shifts, and checking content for structural integrity, are genuinely useful. But no AI tools are a panacea. They all need a human in the loop to check for AI hallucinations, inconsistencies, and errors. AI tools can be a massive efficiency tool but require human intelligence to run them.

Critically, that human-in-the-loop role should also include readers with print disabilities, and it matters when they're involved. Testing needs to happen early in the workflow, while you're setting it up. Once that workflow is reliably producing accessible files, testing every single file with a person with print disability will no longer be necessary. This is the initial, lived-experience validation that earns that trust in the first place.

It's important to remember that AI is not neutral. AI is a reflection of the values of those who create it. And if those values exclude, the technology will exclude. But if those values embrace equity, empathy, and dignity, AI can become one of the greatest enablers of human potential in publishing.

The task, then, is not to resist AI or to defer to it uncritically, but to put it to work deliberately - for accessibility rather than as a substitute for creativity.

AI must stay a tool with a human in the loop. Technology can do the labour, but it can't do the judgement. The minute "we ran it through the tool" replaces "we asked someone who actually uses this", you've slid from access into compliance. Compliance asks whether the file passes. Access asks whether the reader can actually use it - and only people with lived experience can answer that second question.

Legislation as Floor, not Ceiling

The impact of legislation like the European Accessibility Act (EAA) isn't clear yet. There are indeed pockets of thoughtful activity with very busy advocacy groups, lots of training and energy going into accessible outcomes. But the example of Canada is useful here. The Accessible Books Initiative saw a lot of money invested in building capacity for this work in Canada. And many great things happened. But now we hear directly from publishers - "Publishers are tired of being told what to do" and that they are done with this work. Accessibility work is not a one-off fix, it's a cultural shift as much as a technical one. Thinking about accessibility needs to be embedded in what a publisher does. And it's never finished: it is an ongoing process not a destination.

The EAA has driven real, structural change. By requiring publishers selling into the European Union (EU) to produce accessible formats, it's made separate accessible and inaccessible editions by market unsustainable. Following the same logic as the General Data Protection Regulation, it has improved practice globally and given accessibility teams a budget and mandate they didn't have before.

There's more talk about compliance than there used to be, partly in response to the EAA and Title II of the Americans with Disabilties Act (ADA). The key risk is that accessibility work becomes focused on compliance only without thinking of the reader experience. The EAA sets a floor: that is, compliance to WCAG 2.1 AA, EPUB Accessibility 1.1. Meeting that floor doesn't guarantee a genuinely good reading experience. So a lot of the conversation right now is "are we compliant" not "is this actually a good book for this reader".

Where the Real Gap Is

There are a number of different gaps, but we tend to only talk about one - the technical gap. That one is real, but it's actually closing. Tools have improved: Adobe InDesign now exports accessible EPUB reasonably well, and the barriers that made this genuinely hard a few years ago are lower than people think.

What hasn't closed is awareness. Industry surveys run between 2020 and 2026 - in Canada, Australia, the UK, Aotearoa New Zealand, and more recently the USA - are remarkably consistent: publishers lack knowledge of accessibility legislation and standards, and don't know where to start. Accessibility still gets treated as a production issue, rather than something built in from the moment a manuscript is commissioned.

The second gap is the one that matters most, and it's not technical at all: most publishing staff don't actually understand print disabilities. The focus tends to be on blindness rather than the diversity of print disabilities, and on conformance language - tagging, reading order, metadata - and that language tells you what to do without ever explaining why it matters to an actual reader. So you get people who can follow a checklist but don't understand the reader on the other end of it. That's not a skills gap you fix with a better manual. It's a knowledge gap about disability itself - and until publishing addresses that, accessibility stays a compliance checkbox tacked on at the end of the production, instead of something editors and designers actually understand.

And that's not surprising, because very few publishers actually employ people with lived experience of print disability. Two important exceptions come to mind: Stacy Scott at Taylor & Francis, and Simon Holt at Elsevier.

That knowledge gap is cultural, not technical - which raises the question of what's holding the culture itself in place.

Culture vs Structure

The barrier to accessible publishing is culture, underpinned by structure - and those are different problems. It isn't technology: the tools have existed for years. It isn't really regulation either - the Marrakesh Treaty let authorised entities bypass publisher permission entirely, precisely because publishers weren't acting on their own. What was missing was will, investment, and workflow.

Peel back the first layer and you find commercial models and a lack of collaboration. But these, too, are downstream of culture:

a publisher that values accessible reading finds the model and seeks the collaboration; one that treats accessibility as a compliance cost looks for the cheapest way to clear the bar, whatever the technology or regulation allows.

Peel back one more layer and you reach industry structure: a print-first workflow built around the sighted reader as default, thin margins, fragmented production. Even a willing publisher can be constrained by what that structure permits.

Yet structure, too, is downstream of culture - an industry that treated accessibility as core would have built shared infrastructure for it by now, the way it has for distribution or rights management. So if there's one thing underneath all the others, it's culture. Structure is simply where that culture gets reinforced, or starts to change.

So which should the industry address first? Structure - because it's the only lever anyone can actually pull. You can't mandate that people care, but you can mandate a workflow: accessibility considerations at manuscript stage, alt text required and checked for accuracy and completeness before a file moves to production, procurement contracts that specify accessible formats by default. Structure is concrete and auditable - something an organisation can build and be held accountable to. And that's usually how culture shifts too: not by changing minds first, but by changing defaults, and watching minds follow once the new way becomes normal practice rather than an exception someone has to argue for.

The Education Argument

We both teach accessible publishing in publishing programs, and we'd like to see accessibility become a mandatory part of every publishing program.

Right now accessibility is optional in both places that matter: students can graduate without ever properly engaging with it, and staff can build a full career without it ever being core to their role. That optionality is the single biggest thing keeping accessibility a niche specialism, rather than a default skill.

Make it mandatory - taught to every publishing student, embedded in every publishing practice - and two things follow. New professionals enter the industry already treating accessible reading experience as a normal part of editorial, design, and project-management skill. And accessibility expertise stops depending on whether one person in a workplace happens to champion it, because the knowledge is already distributed across the whole team.

That's the one change we'd make, because it's upstream of almost everything else: the technical skill, the judgment, the culture. We would make accessibility mandatory from day one, and the rest becomes much easier to build.

This is already starting to happen: the Institute of Professional Editors in Australia embedded accessibility in the third edition of its "Standards for Editing Practice", and from 2026 it's part of the accreditation exam.

Publishing professionals are not opposed to accessibility. But optional inclusion always loses to competing priorities under time and budget pressure. The only way to protect it is to remove the choice at the structural level - the same way no one leaves correct spelling as an elective skill.

Take Baby Steps, But Just Start

As said earlier, accessibility work is both a process and a culture. Building accessible workflows can feel overwhelming but it's important to dig in. Remember that accessible content is more universally usable content that serves all your readers better. Dig into the legislative impacts where you live, build some internal processes - do all that work.

But most importantly, just get started.

If you don't know how, the new edition of Books without Barriers; A Practical Guide for Inclusive Publishing can help.

Our thanks to Laura and Agata for this overview of their insightful and thought provoking panel. They would very much like to draw attention to the important work of their co-panelist Nor Afifah Shabani. She is Executive Director of eBrelle, a company that makes and distributes refreshable braille devices for readers in Malaysia. They are keen to find publisher partners for their work to make more content available in a country where ninety percent of blind readers are socio-economically disadvantaged.

You can view the original article here.