PAAG charter signatory

We are proud to finish 2025 by signing up to the Publishing Accessibility Action Group charter. Long admirers of the work of PAAG, we have held off from actually signing the charter because we didn’t want only to be a passive bystander to their great work. We wanted to know in our hearts that we’d taken real action. So here is what we’ve done and will continue to do to earn our place on the PAAG list.

This was also published in the 2025 PAAG annual report.

What are your accessibility highlights of the past 12 months?

Over the past year, we’ve focused on making Consonance easier and more inclusive for everyone to use, and we’re proud of the progress we’ve made. We strengthened screen-reader support, improved keyboard-only navigation, and introduced dark mode and the Atkinson Hyperlegible typeface to enhance readability and reduce eye strain.

We also invested in the foundations of long-term accessibility by strengthening our in-house expertise through accessibility training accredited by the International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP), adding automated Playwright accessibility tests to our development workflow, and expanding manual testing with feedback from people with lived experience of disability.

We continue to help our clients get the most out of their ebooks by automatically pulling accessibility metadata from their EPUBs and generating accessible tables of contents to include in their ONIX feeds. Our clients are still responsible for producing accessible files, but once that work is done, we make sure the accessibility information gets in front of the right people.

Across the company, we set WCAG 2.1 Level AA as our baseline and continued moving towards Level AAA where feasible. We also updated our marketing website, user documentation, and training materials to meet WCAG standards, ensuring a more consistent and accessible experience across both our product and our public-facing content.

What are you working towards in terms of accessibility in the coming year?

In the year ahead, we want accessibility to feel even more embedded in how Consonance is designed, built and used. We’ll be working more closely with publishers and accessibility groups, continuing to improve keyboard and screen-reader experiences, and raising our standards as we move towards higher levels of WCAG compliance across our product and website.

Here is a YouTube video that talks about our automated Playwright accessibility testing.

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