For the last few years, achieving compliance with the European Accessibility Act (EAA) has been a strategic goal for many scholarly community organizations. While it is greatly satisfying to see organizations across our industry working very hard to meet the June 28, 2025 deadline, many have communicated that the process comes with its own set of challenges. Understanding these challenges and the strategies used to overcome them can provide valuable insights into the compliance process. With that in mind, we’d like to ask: What has been the most challenging aspect of achieving EAA compliance for your organization, and how have you been addressing it? 

This blog post below is a follow-up to the “European Accessibility Act: Working Toward Compliance and Beyond” post from January 16, 2024. Our contributors share not only the key challenges their organizations have faced on the path to compliance, but also the solutions, workflows, roadmaps, and partnerships they’ve developed in response.

Key challenges identified:

  • navigating legal ambiguity
  • managing back content
  • technical and workflow challenges
  • limited resources
  • vendor alignment

EU flags fly in a row in front of the European Commission building in Brussels, Belgium

Allison Belan, Associate Director for Digital Strategy and Publishing Systems at Duke University Press

The greatest challenge has been navigating the uncertainties raised by the EAA, including its scope and enforcement.

We wrestled with whether journals fall under EAA regulation. We decided to address journal content accessibility as part of our compliance effort regardless of EAA scope. We assumed that a future regulation would unequivocally require it (hello, ADA Title II), and it was operationally efficient to develop aligned guidelines and practices and to train for both books and journals.

Another ambiguity surrounds backlist books: are they required to be compliant on day one or is there a five-year remediation period? Immediate compliance poses a significant challenge given our large backlist of approximately 5,000 titles. We began compliance work in late summer 2024. While we successfully built and deployed new processes in that period for 2025 and future publications, limited staff and financial resources prevent us from fully addressing the backlist by June 2026. We’ve adopted a risk mitigation strategy to manage this challenge, prioritizing top-selling backlist titles in the EU for immediate remediation and planning to budget funds in subsequent years to address the full corpus.

As June 2026 approaches, we are discussing how to manage the unpredictability inherent to the EAA’s structure, namely the delegation of legislation, surveillance, enforcement, and penalties to its 27 member states. To position ourselves as strongly as possible in the face of uncertainty about when and where complaints may arise and with what penalties, we will continue to work on compliance efforts in good faith and demonstrate due diligence. Transparency and responsiveness will be key. We will share information about the accessibility of each publication and about our roadmap progress. We will offer clear channels for buyers and readers to communicate accessibility problems to us and stand ready to address reported problems with specific publications quickly.

Miguel Ramos, Digital Library Project Manager at SPIE, The International Society for Optics and Photonics

The biggest challenges to achieving EAA compliance have been correctly understanding the requirements and tackling the technical aspects of compliance.

We have addressed these tasks by reprioritizing work and charging a small team to focus on ensuring that we are compliant ahead of the EAA deadline. We have been successful in raising awareness and ensuring a majority of accessibility requirements are met due to our platform already being WCAG 2.1 AA compliant. It is around PDFs that we really needed an effort to both work out solutions and gather specialized knowledge of publication workflows and organizational history.

The second set of tasks are more technical in nature but no less challenging as they require creating new workflows to evaluate and add tags to PDFs.

This has necessitated coordination across different teams and continued evaluation of alt text strategies, methodologies and workflow integrations.

Overall, we are confident that we will meet the compliance deadline, and moving forward we will continue to iterate and improve the accessibility of all our products.

Damita Snow, Director, Accessibility & Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Strategy, ASCE Publications and Standards

Navigating the EAA comes with its challenges, especially since vendors approach compliance with different levels of familiarity with the regulations. If you’ve ever found yourself struggling with the legal jargon, you’re not alone — I’ve had moments where certain sections felt unnecessarily complex. Accessibility is a priority, but truly understanding the finer details of compliance takes time and careful analysis.

Fortunately, there are great resources that help make sense of it all. One site I recently found, Tetralogical, does an excellent job of breaking down the EAA’s requirements into clear, straightforward language — perfect for those of us who aren’t legal experts. Articles like this not only make compliance feel more approachable but also empower organizations to meet their obligations with confidence.

At ASCE, we have focused on web accessibility for over a decade and therefore fully committed to following the EAA’s guidelines.

We, like other publishers, understand that web accessibility isn’t just a regulatory checkbox—it’s about making information available to anyone and everyone that wishes access.

That’s why we’ve worked with our vendors to create structured plans to guide our compliance efforts. With clear roadmaps in place, our goal is to not only to meet the necessary requirements but to contribute to a more inclusive digital space actively and continuously. You can visit our site to see the updates we’ve made, including options for users to report access barriers and our ongoing collaborations with publishing vendor partners and other organizations to expand access. As part of our commitment, we are also refining our processes for alt text, conducting monthly accessibility audits across platforms, improving EPUB and PDF conversions, and more.

Stacy Tucker, Product Development Manager at American Medical Association, the JAMA Network

At the JAMA Network®, we are striving to achieve EAA compliance. With 13 journals, including our flagship JAMApublished weekly, our challenge has been balancing our large volume of content with budget constraints. The process of ensuring that all digital content on our sites complies is time consuming, especially considering a large quantity of legacy documents, PDFs, and videos, not to mention our core websites. The project has required substantial investment in new tools and development, as well as audits, training, and significant staff time.

Our approach was to draft a compliance roadmap and prioritize content strategically.

We started with high-impact content, focusing first on key pages and services. One major endeavor was a complete redesign of the article page. By fixing our template and components, the redesign enabled us to ensure that every new page starts off accessible. In addition, we used traffic and usage data to identify which pages users interact with most and addressed those first. We also looked for quick wins, such as identifying the top ten most common accessibility issues and resolving those first.

To maintain compliance in the future, we have scheduled biannual internal audits and created a team-wide accessibility checklist for new content and features. Our goal is to continuously update and maintain our accessibility statement, accessibility conformance report, and roadmap.

Conclusion

As we’re approaching the EAA compliance deadline, it is clear that the work toward compliance has been very complex. A few experiences shared by our contributors highlight not only the challenges but also the need for ongoing change and innovation within our community. From rethinking legacy systems to stronger partnerships with vendors on the topic of accessibility can foster a collective commitment to accessibility.

 

This post is sponsored by the SSP DEIA Accessibility Subcommittee:
  • Patty Brady – American Society of Clinical Oncology
  • Simon Holt – Elsevier
  • Sylvia Izzo Hunter – Canadian Science Publishing
  • Allison Leung – American Chemical Society
  • Kasia Repeta – Duke University Press
  • Amanda Rogers – BioOne
  • Isabel Schnaidt – American Association for the Advancement of Science
  • Damita Snow – American Society of Civil Engineers
  • Stacy Tucker – American Medical Association/ JAMA Network

Kasia Repeta

Kasia Repeta is Analyst for Global Outreach and Publishing Systems at Duke University Press. She is a member of the SSP Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility Committee and leads the work of the SSP’s DEIA Accessibility Subcommittee. She is also a co-chair for the Disability and Accessibility Working Group at Duke University Press.

Allison Belan

Allison Belan is Director for Strategic Innovation and Services at Duke University Press. She directs DUP’s technology and digital publishing operations, including IT, product management, digital content and hosting. Her remit includes digital content strategies, practices, and systems. Additionally, Allison oversees two service offerings to other non-profit scholarly publishers, Project Euclid and the Scholarly Publishing Collective. In her twenty year career in scholarly publishing, Allison has been an active contributor to the Society of Scholarly Publishing, AUPresses, the Triangle Scholarly Scholarly Communications Institute, and numerous other industry groups and conferences.

Miguel Ramos

Miguel Ramos is a librarian who has worked in academic and public libraries, as a Usability Designer for a non-profit healthcare system, and as an educator at a Tribal College. He is currently a project manager for SPIE’s Digital Library, leading efforts in accessibility improvements to its platform, as well as volunteering with C4DISC to help create the Toolkit for Disability Equity.

Damita Snow

Damita Snow

Damita Snow, CAE, ENV SP is Director, Accessibility & Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Publications & Strategy at the American Society of Civil Engineers. She worked on all three Toolkits for Equity, was co-lead of the Antiracism Toolkit for Organizations, is a member of the 2023 Workforce Equity Survey committee and is an immediate past co-chair of the SSP Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility Committee. Snow is also an SSP Board member, ASAE Black Association Executives Board member and former Advisory Board member of AMP Network Associations Council.

Stacy Tucker

Stacy Tucker is a Senior Manager of Quality Assurance with over two decades of experience in scholarly publishing at the JAMA Network. She specializes in quality assurance processes with a strong interest in digital accessibility, ensuring content meets the highest standards for all users. With 21 years of dedicated service, Stacy is deeply committed to continuous improvement and inclusive access in academic publishing.

Discussion

1 Thought on "Guest Post — European Accessibility Act: Navigating the Challenges of EAA Compliance"

Thanks for this. I believe there is also lack of clarity around the disproportionate burden exception, and how it may be defined from one European Union member nation to another. The legal experts I have heard and read on this topic have different advice on how publishers should determine this.

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