EAA 2026 for Education Publishers: Why Closing the Back‑List Gap Cannot Wait

Most UK educational publishers spent the last two years focusing on one priority: preparing new learning content for the European Accessibility Act. With Member States required to apply the measures from 28 June 2025, teams concentrated on bringing recent curriculum resources up to standard.

The challenge emerging now is different. What happens to everything published before the latest production cycles? Back‑list catalogs in education often span fifteen or twenty years. They are stored in older formats such as EPUB 2 (the European Commission’s Accessibility Standardisation), static PDFs, teaching packs, legacy Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) content, and outdated reader platforms. These materials rarely adhere to WCAG‑aligned structure or accessible reading order. As EU distributors and education partners prepare for their own checks, these older assets are becoming the next area of scrutiny.

That shift changes the focus for 2026: the coming year will be less about preparing new releases and more about demonstrating catalog completeness. UK publishers supplying learning materials to the EU must now prove that accessibility is maintained across the entire list, not just the latest output.

The EAA Requirements UK Education Publishers Must Meet

The European Accessibility Act aims to improve the functioning of the internal market for accessible products and services by eliminating barriers created by divergent rules in Member States. It harmonizes accessibility expectations across the EU and confirms that covered products include e‑books, reader software, and e‑commerce environments used by educational institutions.

The enforcement date has already passed: Member States have been required to apply the measures from 28 June 2025, which now sets the baseline that UK publishers must meet to continue serving EU learners and institutions.

For the education sector, compliance reaches well beyond the file itself. It covers how content is navigated, purchased, and used across digital platforms. The W3C’s mapping note confirms that the EPUB Accessibility 1.1 specification meets the act’s technical requirements, including the elements in annex I related to structure, navigation, and interoperability. This places equal weight on:

• The accessibility of the EPUB
• The metadata describing its properties
• The behavior of the platforms that deliver it
• The workflows that ensure these elements stay consistent over time

Instead of treating accessibility as a late‑stage fix, publishers must now ensure that content, metadata, and digital delivery work together to create a compliant learner experience.

Why Back‑List Content Is Becoming the 2026 Pressure Point

Throughout 2024 and 2025, publishers focused heavily on new content pipelines. Teams rebuilt templates, updated QA checks, reintroduced alt‑text expectations, and ran platform retrofits. But backlists are now visible in a way that they were not even a year ago.

Three forces are driving this shift:

1. EU Distributors and Procurement Teams Have Moved from Sampling to Catalogue‑level Checks

The expectation is that accessible content must not be limited to front‑list titles. Distributors want assurance that the materials delivered to schools and universities are consistent, regardless of publication year.

2. Older EPUB and PDF Files Lag Behind Modern Accessibility Baselines

Many back‑list EPUBs were created before structured navigation, semantic tagging, or WCAG‑based reading order became normalized. PDFs often lack logical structure, trees, alt text, continuity of page numbering, or predictable heading levels.

3. Metadata and Delivery Systems Also Fall Behind

Accessible content cannot be discovered or utilized if the metadata fails to declare its accessibility properties. ONIX 3.0 accessibility fields are often missing in legacy catalogues, leaving distributors unable to identify compliant titles.

The combined effect is a widening gap between the compliant front list and an inconsistent back list. With EU partners preparing for post‑deadline reviews, UK publishers need to decide which parts of their backlist are most important and how to bring them up to standard without destabilizing active production schedules.

What Compliance Looks Like Post‑Deadline for UK Publishers

The EAA applies to any UK business that provides services to EU consumers. The threshold is straightforward: businesses with at least 10 staff members and a turnover above €2 million fall within scope. Companies based outside the EU must also comply with the act if they sell relevant services within the EU. This includes publishers distributing through wholesalers, digital platforms, direct‑to‑institution sales, or white‑label partnerships.

The EU factsheet also highlights that e‑books, e‑readers, and reader software are explicitly included. This reinforces that the act is not about abstract accessibility but about reading systems, content, metadata, and the workflows that connect them.

For many UK publishers, the most significant shift in 2026 will be the expectation that compliance is not a one‑time event. It is continuous. Audits will not wait for new products to be developed. They will request end‑to‑end visibility of catalogue breadth, platform readiness, and customer journeys.

Practical Steps to Close the Back‑List Gap

Back‑list remediation rarely succeeds when treated as a single transformation event. It succeeds when publishers take a staged, structured approach that allows production and remediation to run in parallel.

Here are the key components that matter most:

1. Catalogue‑Level Audits

A full audit provides clarity on:

• Which formats are most problematic
• Which years or imprints carry the highest risk
• Where older EPUBs break structural rules
• Where PDFs lack semantic information
• Which metadata records require remediation

This allows publishers to prioritize by impact, market relevance, and educational use.

2. EPUB and PDF Remediation

Remediation typically involves correcting:

• Structure and heading hierarchy
• Reading order
• Image descriptions
• Tables, lists, and math markup
• Page numbers and navigation

The aim is not to “perfect” every title but to make the content reliably usable with assistive technologies. This is where the supporting keyword naturally fits. Assistive technology in education is only effective when navigation, semantics, and metadata allow tools like screen readers or braille displays to interpret material accurately. EU policy is clear that assistive technologies enhance the quality of life for people with disabilities and form part of the legislative and educational ecosystem that publishers must support.

3. Metadata Modernization

Accessible content means little without the ONIX declarations that allow platforms and distributors to identify it. Common gaps include:

• Missing accessibility summary fields
• Incorrect identifiers
• No references to structural navigation
• No statement of WCAG alignment

Consistent ONIX metadata is becoming a core part of EU distributor requirements.

4. Workflow Strengthening

Back‑list work often exposes weaknesses in front‑list processes. Strengthening templates, authoring guidance, image commissioning workflows, and alt‑text guidelines ensures that the gap does not reappear in future cycles.

5. Platform and Reading‑System Updates

Many older digital platforms were built before accessibility was a priority. Updating them to align with WCAG criteria requires careful engineering. This includes consistent focus order, keyboard operability, scalable text, color contrast, clean navigation patterns, and compatibility testing with assistive technologies.

6. Testing with Assistive Technologies

EU policy notes that training and integration of assistive technologies in educational contexts ensure that tools are used effectively. This makes the testing phase essential. Publishers need confirmation that content works with screen readers, switch controls, braille displays, and text‑to‑speech systems.

Addressing legacy material at scale often reveals constraints that sit outside editorial teams: ageing platforms, fragmented archives, gaps in historical metadata, and workflows that were never designed for accessibility in the first place. These are not problems of intent but of infrastructure, and fixing them typically requires capacity and capabilities beyond those of day-to-day production. This is where specialist support becomes practical, especially for publishers aiming to modernise while keeping current programmes on track.

How Magic EdTech Supports Publishers

Magic EdTech works with UK publishers as a services and engineering partner. The aim is to help them improve the quality of their backlists while maintaining steady front-list delivery and working within the systems they already use.

Support typically includes:

• Large-scale EPUB and PDF remediation
• Metadata clean-up and ONIX enrichment
• Platform and reading-system upgrades
• Assistive-technology compatibility testing
• Creation of repeatable pipelines for future cycles
• Workflow and template modernisation for editorial teams

The focus is always on process improvement and sustainable change. Publishers retain ownership of their tech stack. Magic EdTech acts as the engineering and content partner,  handling the heavy lifting and providing long-term stability.

2026: The Year of the Catalog

The European Accessibility Act reached its first major enforcement point in June 2025. What happens next will determine how deeply the directive reshapes educational publishing. Catalogue completeness is now replacing the quick compliance gains made in the run‑up to the deadline. Back‑lists are coming under direct review. Older metadata and systems are facing closer scrutiny, and distributors are requesting evidence that accessibility is applied consistently throughout the entire reading experience.

UK publishers who act now can avoid reactive work later. With clear audits, structured remediation, robust metadata, and tested platforms, the transition becomes manageable. And partners like Magic EdTech can support this work without disrupting active production or pushing changes to technology choices publishers want to retain.

The back‑list gap will not close itself. But with the right plan, it can be addressed well before it becomes a barrier to EU market access.