Accessibility

Accessibility Options

The accessibility options may be accessed from the Accessibility Menu at the top of each page.

Text

The Reading Options bar lets you customise how text is displayed. It is available on text-heavy pages and targets large areas of text, such as journal articles, rather than surrounding page elements, so the reading area stays focused.

Accessibility Mode

Accessibility Mode is a user-enabled theme built from the ground up to be accessible. The current themes are built on older technologies, and it is not possible to make them fully accessible without substantial changes. It will take time to move all existing presses onto the new accessible theme, so in the short term we are offering Accessibility Mode for any user who needs those features.

Preference Storage

If you are logged in, your preferences for both the Reading Options bar and Accessibility Mode are saved to your account and applied on every visit. If you are not logged in, preferences are stored for your current session and may need to be re-entered if your session expires, you clear cookies, or you switch devices.

Janeway

This site is built on Janeway, a web-based platform for publishing journals, preprints, conference proceedings, and books.

Janeway is in the second part of a three phase accessibility improvement plan. The first phase focused on the pages that can be viewed without needing an account (we call this the "Front of House"). This included an overhaul of our tables, landmarks and headings, a new alt-text system, and developing an accessibility mode. We are now in Phase 2 where we are updating the account-only pages (the "Back Office"). In Phase 3 we intend to develop tools for improving the accessiblity of user content.

Janeway conformance data is stored within the codebase, so that its history can be tracked. We audit our platform on a rolling-basis with a combination of manual- and automated-testing alongside reviewing the codebase. The primary purpose of each audit is to identify accessibility improvements and specify them for development. We audit against WCAG 2.2 AA standard, and each success criterion is crosslinked to any work that needs to be done on Github.

Full details of the work done and that planned are in the Janeway Accessibility Project. (external link, opens in new tab).

VPAT