Taylor & Francis becomes a Global Certified Accessible publisher

Books published by Taylor & Francis have been certified as born accessible by Benetech, an independent non-profit organization dedicated to increasing equity and access to education and information.

All new Taylor & Francis publications are available as EPUB files, a format that is considered the most accessible for on-screen reading. Benetech’s accessibility and content quality team has recently reviewed a range of Taylor & Francis EPUB files in depth over eight months, evaluating them for more than one hundred accessibility features. The result was a ‘Benetech Born Accessible score’ of 99% and Global Certified Accessible™ designation.

Benetech’s Global Certified Accessible initiative is the first-ever independent third-party digital accessibility certification program, helping publishers to ensure that content they produce is accessible from the start. Publishers are rigorously evaluated and only approved after demonstrating they consistently produce files in accordance with Benetech’s certification standard.

Stacy Scott, Accessibility Officer at Taylor & Francis, said “We want to ensure an inclusive experience for all, regardless of reading requirement. While there’s still more to do before every Taylor & Francis product and service is born-accessible, receiving this certification is another important milestone and testament to the hard work of many dedicated colleagues.”

Ayan Kishore, CEO at Benetech said, “Students, professors, researchers, and practitioners, all rely on content published by Taylor & Francis to stay informed on the latest advances in their field, and pursue new knowledge. We are proud to partner with Taylor & Francis as the company drives forward an inclusive standard for the publishing industry and increases equity in access to content by ensuring their new publications are born accessible.”

Last year the Taylor & Francis accessibility statement was given an ASPIRE score of 100% for its practical commitment to ensuring all products, platforms, and websites are accessible to as wide an audience as possible. Highlights of this work to date have included expanding an alternative format request process, introducing ReadSpeaker text-to-speech functionality, and converting over 360,000 existing journal articles from PDF into the accessible EPUB format.

Taylor & Francis is also a longstanding partner of Bookshare, Benetech’s eBook library, which gives members around the world easy access to a huge collection of customized eBooks.

Find out more about accessibility at Taylor & Francis