Pressbooks and the U.S New Rule on Accessibility

Accessibility
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In the U.S., the New Rule on the Accessibility of Web Content and Mobile Apps Provided by State and Local Governments goes into effect April 24, 2026. This requires that most web content meet WCAG 2.1, Level AA. Pressbooks’ Accessibility Statement says that it “‘supports’ or ‘partially supports’ all relevant Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 success criteria at the A or AA levels.”

We are beginning the process of assessing our books, including web, pdf, and ePub. There are some things we can fix ourselves but some that I think we will have to request Pressbooks to work on.

Is anyone else doing this? I don’t want to reinvent the wheel if so, and am also happy to share back our findings.

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Hi @elizabeth.kelly we are just putting the final touches on an update to our VPAT that assesses the product against WCAG 2.2 A and AA. This should be out in the next month or so, I believe. If you discover any failures in your published content that you think come from the platform or reading interface, please send them on to premiumsupport and we’d be more than happy to prioritize and address them as soon as we’re able.

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@elizabeth.kelly new VPATs have been published for reading interface and authoring interface: https://pressbooks.com/accessibility/. You can access them directly at https://pressbooks.com/app/uploads/2025/05/2025-05-Pressbooks-reading-interface-VPAT.pdf and https://pressbooks.com/app/uploads/2025/05/2025-05-Pressbooks-authoring-interface-VPAT.pdf. Accessibility roadmap also available at https://pressbooks.com/app/uploads/2025/05/2025-05-28-Pressbooks-Accessibility-Roadmap.pdf. Please do pass on any content issues you find and can’t resolve yourselves.

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