Breaking the Script: Why Global Accessibility Standards Fail Regional Academic Publishing (And How to Fix It)

The accessibility conversation in academic publishing has a blind spot the size of a continent. Standards bodies publish guidelines, publishers rush to comply, and everyone congratulates themselves while roughly half the world's written languages get left behind.

WCAG was built by committees that defaulted to English. EPUB accessibility specifications follow the same pattern. That is not a conspiracy; it is a consequence of who was in the room. And while the standards themselves are not useless for non-Latin content, applying them to Arabic, Devanagari, Tamil, or CJK scripts without significant adaptation is an exercise in wishful thinking.

Here is where the cracks show.

Screen Readers Were Not Built for This

NVDA and JAWS, the dominant screen readers in most institutional settings, handle English with decades of refinement behind them. Switch to Arabic, and you hit problems immediately: right-to-left directionality conflicts with how most PDF and EPUB renderers handle reading order. The logical reading sequence embedded in the file structure frequently does not match the visual layout, which means users relying on assistive technology receive content in scrambled sequence.

Hebrew presents the same directionality issues. Bidirectional content, a journal article that mixes English citations with Arabic body text or Hebrew with embedded Latin transliterations, breaks reading order in ways that purely Latin documents never encounter. The EPUB page progression direction attribute exists to address this. Implementation support across reading systems is inconsistent at best.

Tamil and other South Asian scripts carry their own complexity: ligatures, conjunct consonants, characters that reshape based on surrounding letters. Accessibility checkers scan for alt text, contrast ratios, heading structure. They do not check whether a Tamil conjunct has been rendered as a single glyph or incorrectly decomposed into separate Unicode code points that a screen reader will read as gibberish.

The Text-to-Speech Gap

Text-to-speech engines sit at the centre of this problem. For academic publishers building accessible content, the assumption is that a well-tagged EPUB will read aloud cleanly for users with visual impairments. For Latin-script content, this holds reasonably well.

For Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, or Gujarati academic content, it depends almost entirely on which TTS engine a user's device runs and whether that engine was trained on academic vocabulary rather than casual speech. Technical terms in regional languages are frequently mispronounced or skipped. Mathematical notation embedded in Devanagari text creates compounding failures: the equations do not render correctly in the MathML layer, and the surrounding text gets mangled by a TTS engine that treats the entire block as undifferentiated content.

Japanese and Chinese academic publishing adds another layer. These scripts require shape based rendering that Latin-centric EPUB processors handle inconsistently. Ruby annotations, the small phonetic guides placed above or beside CJK characters, are essential for accessibility in Japanese texts, particularly for students with dyslexia or processing differences. EPUB 3 supports ruby markup. Actual reading system support for ruby in accessible contexts is substantially thinner.

Font Licensing: A Quiet Disaster

This one gets almost no attention in accessibility discussions. Non-Latin scripts require specific font families to render correctly. Generic system fonts frequently lack the full Unicode ranges needed for complex scripts, a fact that affects not just visual presentation but text extraction, copy-paste fidelity, and the ability of assistive technology to parse the content.

Academic publishers routinely license fonts for print and forget that the EPUB requires either embedded fonts or a guarantee that the reading environment will substitute appropriately. For a Latin-script book, a font substitution is an aesthetic problem. For a Tamil journal article, a font substitution can make the content unreadable in the literal sense.

What a Real Solution Looks Like

Fixing this is not a matter of running content through an automated accessibility checker and ticking boxes. It requires script-specific knowledge at the tagging and structure level: correct Unicode normalisation forms for complex scripts, proper lang and xml:lang attributes on every language switch in a multilingual document, validated reading-order logic for bidirectional content, and MathML structures that cooperate with the TTS engines most likely to encounter the file.

S4Carlisle's XML-first publishing workflows address this at the source, which is the only point at which it can be addressed effectively. When accessibility logic is retrofitted onto finished files, critical structural information has already been lost. When it is built into the tagging workflow from the start, a screen reader navigating Tamil academic content gets the same fidelity that an English reader takes for granted.

Global accessibility standards matter. They are the floor, not the ceiling. For multilingual and non-Latin academic publishing, the ceiling is considerably higher, and reaching it requires expertise in the specific technical intersections that generic compliance checklists were never designed to address.

Our NINJA AI Ecosystem and XML-first workflows handle accessibility at the structural level, across scripts, languages, and formats. Contact us to sales@s4carlisle.com to learn how we can support your multilingual accessibility programme.