eBooks can meet a wide variety of accessibility needs, including changing background and font colours, enabling text magnification, supporting text-to-speech and working with assistive technologies.
Unfortunately, not all eBooks are produced or sold in a format which enables these kinds of adaptation. This page gives an overview of how accessible our eBook collections are.
We provide access to eBooks on different platforms with different designs and functionality. Platform providers are expected to publish information describing the accessibility of their platforms to users with disabilities via a platform accessibility statement.
DRM-free eBooks are more accessible for all of our users, and we try to purchase these whenever they are available from suppliers.
Digital Rights Management (DRM) is technology used to control the use of digital content on devices after purchase. While the intention is to prevent unauthorized redistribution, this technology creates restrictions that can impact usability.
The advantage of DRM-Free eBooks is that they meet a wide variety of accessibility needs because the content can be used with any software, including assistive technologies like text to speech tools and immersive readers. Other benefits of DRM-free eBooks downloaded in EPUB format include enabling text magnification, changing background colours and fonts, adjusting line and word spacing, and other features offered by assistive technologies.
Many eBooks are available in EPUB format, which is considered more accessible than the pdf format.
Ahead Ireland recommends the following software:
EBSCO eBook Accessibility User Guide and FAQs
eBook Central is continually designed and developed to meet Level AA of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.2).
Users of eBook Central should be able to:
Read their Accessibility Statement.
The online reader has been tested with:
