Accessibility at Taylor & Francis

This statement was prepared in January 2020. It was last updated on 28 July 2020.

At Taylor & Francis, we are committed to ensuring all our products and websites are accessible to as wide an audience as possible. We strive to continually improve the accessibility of our eBook, journal, digital platform, and website offerings.

To guide us in our efforts, we use the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, the US Government Section 508 Standards, and W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0/2.1. We are working toward the A and AA compliance levels of the WCAG 2.1.

Our continuing work on accessibility improvements

Working with the Accessible Community

Taylor & Francis works closely with key advocates of accessibility, including BookShare in the USA and Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) in the UK.

BookShare and RNIB both offer a direct path to enable visually impaired students to participate in classroom lectures. They give confidence to professors adopting and teaching our textbooks, knowing their students will have equal and full access to the content they teach. They also ensure visually impaired professors can adopt and utilize adequate material for their own purposes. Both charities have a wide reach and are trusted by libraries, universities, students and general customers.

We have supplied thousands of textbooks and other products to BookShare since we started working with them in 2010. Our contributions now include a back catalog of more than 87,000 titles, offering even more content and a better customer experience.

In 2019, Taylor & Francis increased our product offerings in a similar manner to RNIB BookShare (previously Load2Learn), providing accessible content support in the UK and across international borders.

Both charities receive our content via automated distribution upon title publication, ensuring quick and efficient access to content by all users.

Alternative Text

As part of our commitment to WCAG A-level compliance, Taylor & Francis has begun to trial Alt Text creation (alternative text descriptions for our figures, images, tables and charts) for several of our key book and journal products. These trials are currently expanding, and our goal is to publish a large volume of fully born-accessible content within the next 6-12 months.s.

Voluntary Product Accessibility Templates (VPAT)

Taylor & Francis has chosen to complete the International version of The Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) which encompasses Section 508 (US), EN 301 549 (EU) and WCAG2.1 for its products. The VPAT is a document which evaluates how accessible a product is. It is a self-disclosing document produced by the vendor which details each aspect of WCAG 2.1 requirements and how the product supports each criterion.

You can find product VPATs for a selection of our platforms here:
Taylor & Francis Online
TaylorFrancis.com
Combined Chemical Dictionaries
ChemNetBase home
Dictionary of Commonly Cited Compounds
Dictionary of Food Compounds
Dictionary of Inorganic and Organometallic Compounds
Dictionary of Marine Natural Products
Dictionary of Natural Products
Dictionary of Organic Compounds
Dictionary of Drugs
Handbook of Chemistry and Physics
Properties of Organic Compounds
Polymers: A Property A Database

Taylor & Francis Online

Taylor & Francis Online introduced a new feature in 2019 offering an innovative text to audio option for all journal content, enriching their content for all online users, while making it more accessible to a wider range of readers.

The introduction of Readspeaker allows logged-in users on Taylor & Francis Online to select the journal article they are looking for and listen to it via audio, simply by highlighting or hovering over specific sections, or by pressing play to listen to the entire article from start to finish.

Accessible Navigation, Magnification and Print/Copy Limitations

Each Taylor & Francis site may vary, but our Product team are working to enhance user experience across our journals and books platforms, as well as our websites.

Please review the individual accessibility statements for navigational information relating to Taylor & Francis Online, Taylor & Francis Books, the Routledge website and the Taylor & Francis website.

Users with a disability can visit AbilityNet to find advice on how to make your device easier to use and the DAISY Consortium guidance on reading systems contains further information about different reading devices as tested by persons with disabilities.

Adobe offers Adobe Reader and provides a guide for using the inbuilt accessibility features of Adobe Reader: Reading PDFs with reflow and accessibility features.

If you would like more information or help with web accessibility, the BBC website My Web, My Way is an excellent resource.

Taylor & Francis Content – Available Formats

Taylor & Francis provides accessible content for our books and journals products in PDF, ePub2, ePub3, and HTML format (journal content only). Varying levels of accessibility are available depending on the age of the product.

You may purchase Taylor & Francis eBooks from any one of our many eBook sellers, including Amazon, ProQuest, EBSCO and more. Our eBooks should be accessible via these platforms and other available eReaders, though some titles may contain Digital-Rights Management (DRM).

Library customers will find more than 90,000 book titles in PDF format on our eBooks platform.

Our journal content has been published in both HTML and accessible PDF formats. Secondary content has been provided as HTML where possible and accessible PDFs where not.

We remediate online content, such as PowerPoints, held on our companion websites and instructor sites. If a DVD is packaged with a book you have purchased, this should already contain closed captioning as an option and we provide transcripts wherever possible.

We also provide YouTube playlists for many of our companion websites. YouTube allows users to turn on closed captioning for individual videos, or for all videos by setting this as a default. You can turn on closed captions by clicking the CC icon at the bottom right of the video. If you would like closed captions to be turned on for all YouTube videos this can be done by changing your account settings. More information on how to do this can be found by going to YouTube Help.

Alternative Format Requests

We can provide a large quantity of our books and journals in accessible, electronic format to students or customers with a visual impairment or print disability.

Taylor & Francis publishes the majority of its new titles, and many older titles, in accessible eBook formats (mostly ePub3, but also PDF/UA) either for individual purchase or on platforms suitable for institutions. When a work is unavailable for purchase in a suitable format, we will endeavour to provide one on request from both individuals and institutions, , within 1-3 working days.

Provided texts are DRM-free and are primarily available in searchable PDF format, which function with most screen reading software. Alternatively, we can supply texts in Word, ePub or XML format.

Some of our content in PDF format may not have been designed for accessibility – for example, older archive content reproduced from original printed sources may be presented as scanned PDFs, or images of text. We will always attempt to supply an OCR PDF (with optical character recognition) for screen reading, but this may not always be possible.

Please note, when purchase of an accessible eBook or journal article is not possible and a request is made, we require that the requested title has been legally obtained (by either the university or individual) before we are able to provide the text. It is also notable that texts published before the year 2000 are less likely to be immediately available in electronic format.

All material published by Taylor & Francis Group, and its imprints, is protected under international copyright and intellectual property laws and we ask you to respect this when using our content.

For more information on our books and journals, please visit www.taylorandfrancis.com.

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