Our dedication 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 and 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. Alongside our print editions we offer:

Web PDF: our Digital Rights Management (DRM)-free, accessible web-ready PDFs have extensive hyperlinking and are bookmarked to offer the reader a more interactive experience than a flat PDF. The link to access the PDF is available through the book product webpage on the UCL Press website. We disseminate our open access web PDFs to a variety of platforms including JSTOR and OAPEN.
EPUB: the majority of our EPUB files are reflowable, enabled for magnification, and customisation and all include hyperlinked headings, subheadings, figures and tables. From September 2024 all titles have been published as accessible EPUB3 files with embedded alt text and are validated by the ACE by DAISY EPUB accessiblity tool. Our EPUBs are distributed by Gardners and available to purchase through retailers.

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 details conformance with the AA standard of WCAG 2.2.

We have recently integrated our alt text and accessibility guidance into our journal author guidelines and briefed journal editors on new accessibility requirements. From 2026 all journal articles with figures will be submitted with alt text as standard.

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. It supports reflowable text (with zoom up to 500% and includes customisation options such as text resizing (200%).

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. Our authors provide alt text for images with their submission, and it goes through quality-checking processes. We are working to include alt text on all backlist titles.

Licensing

UCL Press’s open access policy supports copy and paste in line with copyright laws.

The copyright of our books belongs to our authors. All our books are open access and published under a Creative Commons licence, which means they can be modified according to the terms of the licence. We request that you observe copyright law and the conditions of the specific Creative Commons licence type included in the book when using the files we provide. See more information on Creative Commons licences.

Accessibility roadmap

EPUBs: All books published from September 2024 onwards are available as an accessible EPUB file. The backlist will be addressed in stages. We aim to have our full backlist available as accessible EPUBs by the end of 2026. In the meantime, we have implemented a request system should you require a title we don’t currently have an accessible version for.

Accessibility training and guidelines for authors: We already include guidelines on accessibility as part of our author guidelines including specific guidelines on alt text. We will continue to join webinars and training events on accessibility, run regular training for our in-house team, work closely with our suppliers on requirements and expectations of quality in this area, and keep our author guidelines up to date as requirements develop or change

Website accessibility: We are committed to making our website as accessible as possible. Assisted by the Digital Accessibility team at UCL we do regular user testing of our website. We are currently prioritising work on the main navigation menu, ensuring menu items and dropdowns are accessible using keyboard navigation.

Our accessibility work

Read how we’ve been making our content accessible.

We supply our web PDFs and EPUBs to RNIB as part of our commitment to their Bookshare programme. To request a file users do not need to provide proof of disability or medical documentation. A simple confirmation that the user is registered with their organisation’s disability support team is sufficient.

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.

• Beyond the Visual: Multisensory modes of beholding art edited by Ken Wilder and Aaron McPeake.

• Captioning and Subtitling for d/Deaf and Hard of Hearing Audiences by Soledad Zarate.

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 working days.

This statement was prepared on 5 February 2026. It was last updated on 5 February 2026.