Amazon, publishers Pushing for Better accessibility Of E-Books, new report says
My friend (and Six Colors contributor) Shelly Brisbin links this morning to a story about Kindle books gaining more robust accessibility features for Blind and low vision bookworms. She links to a story from Michael Kozlowski of Good eReader, who reported last Friday Amazon is now “prioritizing new accessibility features” for visual disabilities.
“Amazon has been pushing accessibility hard lately, making Kindle books and Kindle e-readers better suited for people with visual disabilities. They have added a new tab to book description pages, called Accessibility,” Kozlowski said of Amazon’s zeal for stronger Kindle accessibility. “It has new Accessibility metadata, including Visual Adjustments, Non-Visual Reading, Conformance, and Navigation.”
“Amazon might be the only company to take accessibility this seriously,” he added.
Kozlowski also said book publishers “have been prioritizing the submission of e-books to Amazon that include accessibility features,” noting an extrinsic motivator is regulation. Indeed, disability-centric laws on the books such as the Americans with Disabilities Act and the recently-enforced European Accessibility Act are “increasing legal pressure to make digital content accessible” by “positioning accessible publishing as both a competitive advantage and a necessity.” One of the biggest publishing houses today, the venerable Simon & Schuster, is a big proponent of better accessibility in the ebook arena; whereas only 60% of its catalog was certified accessible between 2022–2024, that number has risen to 100% this year, according to Kozlowski. Simon & Schuster is a prolific publisher, putting out 800 titles each year.
As Brisbin and Kozlowski both mention, ebook accessibility historically has been hit-or-miss. That Amazon (and publishers) are pushing to close this chasm is heartening. I have an old Paperwhite from 2018 and, while I haven’t used it for awhile since I prefer Apple Books for accessibility reasons, only ever used the larger font size on my Kindle. It was great, and I could read fine; I just prefer the bigger and brighter display of an iPad’s screen—e-ink and LCD are two entirely different display technologies—and I find the accessibility features on iPadOS to be far more comprehensive than Amazon’s suite.
