Meeting Amazon KDP's real requirements and the EU's accessibility standards in Deckle comes down to a few concrete things: your platform target, your table of contents, and your image alt text, not a long checklist of manual formatting work.
What You'll Need
- A finished manuscript in Deckle.
- Images with alt text already written, if your manuscript includes any.
Step-by-Step
- Design your book normally in Styles: fonts, chapter headers, colors, and everything else. None of this is requirement-driven; it's what your readers actually see.
- Write real alt text for every image, in the Insert Image dialog's alt text field, as you add each one. This is the one accessibility requirement no export tool can do for you: Deckle gives you the field, but the description has to come from you.
- Turn on Include Table of Contents (Compile → Options tab). This satisfies Amazon KDP's requirement for a logical table of contents, generated automatically from your chapter titles, no manual TOC-building needed.
- Pick your Platform Target on Compile's Format tab: Kindle if you're publishing to KDP specifically (it tunes image sizing and adds hyphenation for Kindle's renderer), Apple Books or Kobo for those platforms, or Generic if you want one all-purpose file.
- Export and upload the
.epubdirectly. KDP lists EPUB as its own accepted format, so no separate conversion step is needed regardless of which target you picked.
Common Mistakes
- Skipping alt text because nothing forces you to fill it in. The field is there in Deckle's image dialog, but it's easy to breeze past when you're focused on the image itself.
- Assuming the Kindle target produces a
.kpffile. It doesn't. Deckle's Kindle target still exports a standard.epub, which KDP accepts directly on its own. - Assuming you're automatically exempt from EU accessibility requirements as a small/solo author. That exemption is genuinely unresolved (see the European EPUB requirements article); don't skip the accessibility work on that assumption alone.
FAQ
Does turning on Table of Contents in Deckle satisfy KDP's TOC requirement?
Yes, KDP requires a logical table of contents, and Deckle's Include Table of Contents option generates one automatically from your chapter titles.
What's the one thing I actually need to do myself for EU accessibility compliance?
Write real, meaningful alt text for every image. Deckle's EPUB output is already built on EPUB 3 markup (the baseline the accessibility standard requires), but alt text has to come from you.
Which EPUB target should I choose for KDP?
Kindle: it tunes image sizing and hyphenation for Kindle's renderer. The exported file is a standard .epub regardless of which target you pick.