Our commitment to accessibility

At UCL Press we are committed to making our content available to all readers, embedding accessibility within our digital strategy, and ensuring accessibility considerations are taken into account right from the commissioning stages through to publication. As an open access press, it is important our publications are available to all readers without barriers.

We have put accessibility at the forefront of our publishing with training for our team and guidelines for authors, and we monitor accessibility throughout the writing and production process. We ensure our titles are carefully formatted and have a logical reading structure that is easy to navigate and that our authors are aware of alt text requirements.

We use Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 as our guide. Our target of compliance is level AA.

Our books

We are pleased to work with vendors accredited by Benetech’s Global Certified Accessible group who ensure our frontlist ebooks are produced to current accessibility standards. Our open access mission is supported by a wide range of formats including:

Web PDF: our DRM-free, accessible web-ready PDFs have extensive hyperlinking and are bookmarked to offer the reader a more interactive experience than a flat PDF.
EPUB: the majority of our EPUB files are reflowable, and all include hyperlinked headings, subheadings, figures and tables. All frontlist titles are published as accessible EPUB3 files with alt text and are validated by the ACE by Daisy epub accessiblity tool.

Journals and journal articles

The UCL Press journals and journals website is hosted on the Janeway platform. All journal articles are published full text in HTML (XML) and PDF format. Janeway’s current accessibility information detailing conformance with the AA standard of WCAG 2.2 is available at https://www.openlibhums.org/site/accessibility.

BOOCs

UCL Digital Press is home to our BOOCs (Books as Open Online Content). This is a HTML-based site and is fully responsive to automatically adjust for different screen sizes.

Alt text

Alt text (alternative text) is a short description of an image that is used to describe the content of the image for readers who use digital screen readers due to visual impairment or other reasons.

UCL Press titles published since September 2024 include alt text and long descriptions, where appropriate. We are working to include alt text on all backlist titles.

Our accessibility work

Read how we’ve been making our content accessible.

We will be working with the Royal National Institute of Blind People Bookshare database and Bookshare to make the full collection of books available.

We are a signatory to the Publishing Accessibility Action Group (PAAG) charter.

We provide guidelines to our authors on accessibility in our author guidelines, artwork guidelines and alt text guidelines. We run regular training with our Press team on accessibility requirements and legislation.

We are contributing to a set of author submission guidelines that will be shared with the Publishing Accessibility Action Group and seek to provide a common statement about the principles of accessibility for academic authors – when finalised these will be placed on Make Things Accessible.

We work closely with the Digital Accessibility team at UCL and ensure we are aligned with UCL’s wider digital accessibility policy.

In addition, we are committed to accessibility through our publications, including:

• Vision Impairment: Science, art and lived experience by Michael Crossland. https://uclpress.co.uk/book/vision-impairment/

• Beyond the Visual: Multisensory modes of beholding art edited by Ken Wilder and Aaron McPeake. https://uclpress.co.uk/book/beyond-the-visual/

• Captioning and Subtitling for d/Deaf and Hard of Hearing Audiences by Soledad Zarate. https://uclpress.co.uk/book/captioning-and-subtitling-for-d-deaf-and-hard-of-hearing-audiences/

Resources

Get in touch

Your feedback is valuable, and we would love to hear your thoughts so that we can continue to improve our content. Please contact us at uclpressaccessibility@ucl.ac.uk.

Make a request

Where a title is not yet published in a fully accessible format, a request for an accessible EPUB3 file can be made via uclpressaccessibility@ucl.ac.uk.

We aim to respond to all accessibility requests within three working days, and to fulfil accessibility requests within a further five to ten working days.