Accessibility Statement

At UCL Press we are committed to making our content available to all readers and adhering to the WCAG 2.2 AA guidelines. As an open access press, it is important our publications are available to all readers without barriers.

All our books and journals are produced with accessibility in mind – they are carefully formatted texts and have a logical reading structure, with sequential headings. Please see below for more details.

Web pdfs and EPUBs

We ensure our typesetters and designers use the latest version of InDesign which tags all text elements and is optimised for accessibility.
Our primary open-access format for books is a web-ready PDF. Our web-ready PDFs have extensive hyperlinking and are bookmarked to offer the reader a more interactive experience than a flat PDF.
Our EPUB files are reflowable, with hyperlinked headings, subheadings, figures etc.

Journals and journal articles

The UCL Press journals and journals website https://journals.uclpress.co.uk 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.

Accessibility services

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

Other work

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.

Resources

Feedback

Please send any feedback to 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.