Gold standard accolade for accessibility statement on Cambridge Core
Cambridge Core – the online home of academic books and journals from Cambridge University Press – has come top in an assessment of accessibility information for those with disabilities.
Independent verification service ASPIRE reviews and ranks the information available for disabled users of publishers’ online platforms and gives each a score. The aim is to standardise accessibility statements, so that readers know the benefits they can exploit or the barriers they need to work around when accessing texts in digital format.
The accessibility statement on Cambridge Core has just recorded a gold standard ASPIREscore of 100 per cent, placing it joint top on the ASPIRElist rankings.
James Carr, User Experience Manager for Academic Publishing at the Press, said: “Cambridge University Press is committed to helping readers and academics of all abilities to take fast and easy journeys to content hosted on our platform, Cambridge Core. Part of this commitment includes making our accessibility statement as discoverable and useful as possible.
“The ASPIREreview provided us with valuable insights that enabled us to make updates resulting in clearer and more accurate accessibility information. We hope this will save our end users significant time and effort, so that using Cambridge Core continues to offer an efficient and positive user experience.”
The ASPIRE (Accessible Statements Promoting Improved Reading Experience) project was launched in 2018 as a crowdsourced project to evaluate the quality of accessibility statements in the publishing industry. Since then, it has partnered with textBOX, a company working to improve alt-text descriptions, and grown to help publishers create a transparent environment for content.
The Core team are continuously finding ways to improve and protect the accessibility of the platform.
James added: “We have recently undergone a third-party accessibility audit, involving expert reviews and testing by users with various disabilities. As a result of this, improvements have been made to the user interface of the site.
“A cross-functional working group also meets regularly to discuss and take action on improving the accessibility of scholarly content hosted on Cambridge Core and we are expanding our knowledge of accessibility by training our product teams in best practice to ensure inclusive design is central to all new feature development.”
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