On International Book Day, millions of people in France are effectively locked out of public libraries, not because accessible books don't exist, but because the platforms meant to lend them don't work for people with disabilities.
A new report from the French Federation of the Blind and Partially Sighted reveals a stark picture: out of 1,001 public libraries monitored, only 10 fully comply with their digital accessibility obligations. That's less than 1%. Worse still, 780 of those institutions have published no accessibility documentation whatsoever, no statement, no plan, no acknowledgement of the problem.
Around 10% of France's population is considered "print-disabled," meaning they cannot read standard printed text. This includes people with visual impairments, dyslexia, motor or cognitive disabilities. For these readers, digital books hold enormous promise. A single ePub file can be displayed in large print, read aloud by a synthetic voice, or rendered on a refreshable braille display. Publishers are increasingly producing titles in these "born accessible" formats, and since the European Accessibility Act came into force in June 2025, the momentum has only grown.
The problem, then, is not the books. It is the library portals through which those books are borrowed. A study conducted for the French Ministry of Culture tested three digital lending platforms with visually impaired users. The results were damning: 73% were unable to borrow a book independently. Those who did manage it took an average of 36 minutes, compared to 10-20 minutes for users without a disability. Unlabelled buttons, broken forms, and interfaces incompatible with screen readers blocked users at every stage.
France has had legal obligations on digital accessibility since 2009, with a compliance deadline set for 2012. That was 14 years ago. Yet only 6.8% of libraries have a valid accessibility statement today. Even the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (aka BnF, the country's flagship institution) has not updated its Gallica accessibility audit since December 2022, when the site was rated compliant at under 40%.
The consequences are real. Unable to use legal platforms, many disabled readers turn to specialised libraries, which are valuable but cannot cover the full range of published output. Others quietly resort to illegal download sites, where accessible file formats are easier to use than anything offered by official channels.
A national portal for accessible publishing is in development, announced back in 2022 and entrusted to the BnF. If built ambitiously, (integrating not just a catalogue but a proper lending mechanism) it could genuinely change things. But no call for tenders has yet been published, and its final scope remains unclear.
The situation in 2026 is different from what it was a decade ago. The technology works. The books exist. What is missing is political will. Exclusion from reading is no longer a technical inevitability. It has become a choice.
(Written from an article by Fernando Pinto da Silva)