Accessibility at Elsevier: A Collaborative, Continuous-Improvement Approach

By Nicholas Seow (Accessibility Specialist, Elsevier) and Simon Holt (Senior Product Manager, Content Accessibility, Elsevier)

Accessibility is a necessarily expansive concept. Various other articles in this issue are likely to have traced its outline with eloquence, leaving, perhaps, a key statistic or anecdote resounding in the memory. Accessibility is that takeaway, which we do hope you’ll keep forever — as well as the diverse constellations of lived experiences underpinning its rhetorical force. The practice of accessibility invites everyone in.

We think that accessibility, encompassing as it is, is also resistant to neat solutionism. We don’t mean that the goal of universal access, however defined, is unattainable. Instead, as practitioners, our shared aspirations for equitable and inclusive societies, workplaces, or educational spaces may come to fruition only when we properly attune ourselves to the needs of marginalized groups within these institutional settings, especially people with disabilities. Here we aim to share some examples showing how this ethos underpins our efforts at our organization, and explore how we are to follow through on our broader commitment to accessibility.

What Are the Main Standards and How Do We Conform?

With complex topics, one may tend to clamor for a point of shared reference. Perhaps this shared reference is needed even more urgently when it comes to something as broad as Digital Accessibility — or (to take a stab at cogency) the designing and building of digital products so that everyone, regardless of ability or disability, can access and use them easily and meaningfully. For our collective understanding, enter the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), recently entering version 2.2, published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards body. 1

An international standard incorporated by reference into the laws of various jurisdictions, pored over by experts and bureaucrats, WCAG Level AA is a conventional rubric to comprehensively evaluate the accessibility of a product or service.2 To that end, our Digital Accessibility Team at Elsevier conducts periodic assessments of our products against the normative requirements and supplementary prescriptions of the WCAG Success Criteria. 3 Some of the most important parts of our testing methodology involve the use of common assistive technology such as screen readers and screen magnifiers.

These results are compiled into publicly available documentation in the form of Voluntary Product Accessibility Templates or Accessibility Conformance Reports (VPATs/ ACRs). Here’s an example for ScienceDirect . 4 We hope the community finds these documents useful; we include explanations and examples to support conformance claims, and detail specific points of exception under each WCAG Success Criterion, including the practical consequences of various issues for users of assistive technology.

How Do We Work with Others to Improve Accessibility?

Our Digital Accessibility Team’s greater remit, beyond assessing products for standards conformance, is to foster a culture of collaboration around accessibility to tackle problems both within and beyond Elsevier. Internally, we have implemented a structured program (inspired by Intuit’s Accessibility Champions5) to promote co-leadership of accessibility practice across various roles within the organization, along with agreed objectives and reporting. The program, at its best, promotes a community of knowledgeable and committed practitioners for each product that spans the company. Accessibility Champions undergo a training and accreditation course, demystifying accessibility for even the newly initiated.

Within our ScienceDirect 6 team, an internal guild of Accessibility Champions meets weekly to discuss issues or conduct accessibility reviews of new features. We can also trace a wealth of knowledge and direct product improvements to collaborative efforts with our end users. Colleagues in various roles at ScienceDirect (e.g., on development, quality, or UX teams) are encouraged to attend user experience interviews conducted with people with disabilities. At SciVal,7 which features dense interfaces with charts and graphs, user testing is currently ongoing with a screen-reader user who is blind. The complexity of the product’s interfaces renders iteration and experimentation based on direct customer feedback essential; perhaps more progress is being made towards an accessible and user-friendly platform by closing these feedback loops than under the technical direction of a checklist-based remediation plan. Experience and empathy are built, collectively, along the process of understanding how and why users with disabilities might encounter various barriers — and in having incorrect assumptions around the utilization of assistive technology dispelled by actual users of the service.

Elsevier’s multi-year collaboration with Highcharts, 8 who specialize in a software library for interactive visualizations, grew out of a shared understanding of the challenges that charts and graphs commonly pose to users with disabilities, especially blindness and low vision/visual impairments. A routine VPAT assessment of Scopus 9 had initially uncovered several accessibility issues with a third-party component (developed by Highcharts) used to render charts. We reached out to Highcharts to communicate the issue, without necessarily proposing a specific solution; from this earnest point of contact, a joint effort to co-develop the first accessibility-focused module for Highcharts’ SVG library swiftly ensued. We continue to cooperate with Highcharts on feature development and research, including focused user experience testing on novel techniques such as sonification, and occasionally co-present new developments at assistive technology conferences.

How is Accessibility Embedded into Your Design Principles?

Design systems are collections of styles, components, patterns, and other guidelines used to maintain consistency in the design of web applications. Elsevier has three design systems, each employed across different suites of products and platforms. Through consistent, accessible design building blocks which permeate downstream to dozens of products, we can integrate design principles more widely and therefore help more people with disabilities access what they need. For instance, Elsevier’s brand guidelines (one of the design systems) includes accessibility-specific guidance on color schemes to ensure sufficient contrast between text/ components and backgrounds. The documentation on many individual components within the design system is also accompanied by lists of accessibility guidelines, with applicable WCAG success criterion references.

Elsevier’s brand guidelines additionally feature several Accessibility Personas, a typology of fictionalized yet representative users. These illustrated Personas were informed by extensive user research — each includes descriptions of a hypothetical user’s disability, including the assistive technologies utilized in their typical workday, considerations for accessible content to properly meet their needs, and the common challenges and frustrations experienced along their work. Incorporating such personas into the standard set of design methods helps highlight the needs and experiences of diverse users with disabilities in product development, and further builds understanding across our development teams.

How Has a Continuous Improvement-Oriented Approach Improved Accessibility Outcomes?

ScienceDirect’s team has similarly cast a broad net for accessibility in its accounting for common “use cases” — an effort preceding the introduction of the brand guidelines’ Accessibility Personas. With an ethos of continuous improvement, ScienceDirect has attempted to address usability for a diverse range of disabilities. More details are available on our Accessibility Statement page.10 For example, to support users with blindness who may be using screen readers, content is made programmatically determinable via markup as far as possible, and keyboard modality (all functionality available using keyboard only) is fully supported; for users with low vision, the platform features good color contrast and the ability to resize (zoom in on) text without loss of content or functionality. A successful pilot project to provide closed captioning on the Open Access journal Science Talks,11 which consists primarily of audiovisual content, will be followed by an effort to extend the author proofing process to the captions to ensure their quality.

What About the Future — How is Elsevier Responding to Emerging Legislation Like the European Accessibility Act?

The wave of accessibility-based legislation — whether via parliamentary acts or case law — passed in several nations and regions in recent years has given us all in the publishing community an opportunity to evaluate the work done to date, what gaps remain and, in the longer term, where we would ultimately like to be. The European Accessibility Act and cases brought under Section 508 of the U.S. Americans with Disabilities Act are perhaps the most widely known amongst these, but recent acts have also been passed in Canada and Australia, for example. Each of the standards outlined in these acts aim to ensure greater accessibility of web-based content and environments, and apply the common WCAG guidelines already discussed above. As WCAG evolves, so the guidelines, standards and, ultimately, laws by which we map and measure accessibility will also evolve. This formalizes the continuous improvement approach outlined above. This framework also aligns well with the collaborative approach to try and figure out the best way collectively to provide the most accessible content to our readers, given that increasing accessibility is a goal common to us all across scholarly communications. The challenges we face to get there are common, too. To this end, we are glad to be part of organizations such as the Publishing Accessibility Action Group, 12 the Federation of European Publishers’ accessibility working group 13 and the DAISY consortium’s Inclusive Publishing group,14 as well as the Accessible Books Consortium,15 all of which help us exchange information with others across the industry and learn together in what is a rapidly changing landscape.

For a publisher such as Elsevier, who publishes a large and varied program of content each year on a multitude of platforms, a key challenge is around how to systematically ensure we are making as much of our content accessible as possible to the widest number of people as we can. This means using born accessible principles to embed accessibility into our processes and workflows, building on the Born Accessible principles we gained from undertaking the Benetech Globally Certified Accessible accreditation process16 for our books program. We are already making rapid progress in some areas — for example, we have published our books in EPUB format since 2011, and we are working to ensure our book and journal PDFs are optimized for screen reader use, too. In other areas, like image alttext, closed captions and transcripts provision, we see new technologies as a key enabler to being able to standardize accessibility features into all of our content. The pace at which we are able to do this will inevitably be dictated by how quickly these technologies mature. Automated closed captioning, for example, is markedly better today than it was five years ago. The ability for us to roll out alt-text to the entirety of our content (beyond what is already mandated by the European Accessibility Act) will in turn be led by the pace of evolution here, too. In line with our principles around responsible use of AI technology, by combining automation at scale with human subject-matter expertise, we feel it will eventually be possible to make everything we publish “born accessible.”

Similarly, from a platforms point of view, we continue to make progress, whilst acknowledging this is a multi-faceted process. We are proud to note our ScienceDirect platform recently achieved the #1 spot in the 2023 WebAIM Million analysis of the world’s most accessible home pages.17 We will continue to improve our websites and mobile apps which sell, showcase, and play eBook content towards comprehensive conformity with the WCAG 2.1 AA standards. All eCommerce sites, such as those where users can make purchases, will similarly conform to WCAG

2.1 level AA. We also plan to provide VPAT documentation to attest that our web content is Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust in line with WCAG 2.1 and the European Accessibility Act. 18

There is no magic bullet that suddenly makes everything accessible; no declaration or piece of legislation can automatically make it so. This is a long-term process and our plan is to keep improving each year. As we said about the ScienceDirect WebAIM Million award,

As much as we are proud of this result, the WebAIM #1 ranking does not mean we are done with accessibility, nor does it mean the platform is error free. Instead, we see it as a testament to our commitment to accessibility over the past 20 years and additional motivation to reinforce our efforts towards making ScienceDirect one of the most accessible platforms of peer-reviewed scholarly literature.19

By embracing technology, working together with our peers and communities we serve, continuously improving and learning from one another, we are able to make more of our content optimized for readers with disabilities. We are at a time of great change and great opportunity both technologically and legally; we aim to grasp this to create positive durable solutions that markedly enhance the accessibility of our content, products and services.

Endnotes

1. W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), WCAG 2 Overview, https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/ , Accessed 21 March 2024.

2. Accessible Metrics, “What are the Levels of WCAG Compliance?” https://www.accessiblemetrics.com/blog/ what-are-the-levels-of-wcag-compliance/ , Accessed 21 March 2024

3. MacDonald, David. “What are WCAG Success Criteria? (Tips on how to write them),” https://www.davidmacd.com/blog/ what-are-WCAG-success-criteria.html#:~:text=Success%20 Criteria%20address%20a%20situation,through%20 automated%20or%20manual%20processes , Accessed 21 March 2024.

4. Elsevier Digital Accessibility Team. “VPAT/ACR Voluntary Product Accessibility Template ScienceDirect,” 16 November 2023. https://supportcontent.elsevier.com/RightNow%20 Next%20Gen/ScienceDirect/VPAT_ScienceDirect_ November_2023.pdf, Accessed 21 March 2024.

5. Drake, Ted. “Intuit’s Accessibility Champions Program,” 29 August 2023. https://medium.com/intuit-design/intuitsaccessibility-champions-program-b6c0b945a476, Accessed 21 March 2024.

6. Elsevier. ScienceDirect home page. https://www.sciencedirect. com/, Accessed 21 March 2024.

7. Elsevier. SciVal home page. https://www.scival.com/landing, Accessed 21 March 2024.

8. Highcharts. Home page. https://www.highcharts.com/ , Accessed 21 March 2024.

9. Elsevier. Scopus Preview home page. https://www.scopus. com/#basic, Accessed 21 March 2024.

10. Elsevier. “Accessibility Statement ScienceDirect,” 30 January 2024. https://service.elsevier.com/app/answers/ detail/a_id/37160/supporthub/sciencedirect/~/accessibilitystatement-sciencedirect/, Accessed 21 March 2024.

11. Elsevier. Science Talks home page. https://www.sciencedirect. com/journal/science-talks, Accessed 21 March 2024.

12. UK Publishing Accessibility Action Group (PAAG) home page. https://www.paag.uk/, Accessed 21 March 2024.

13. Federation of European Publishers. “Accessibility.” https:// fep-fee.eu/-Accessibility-89-, Accessed 21 March 2024.

14. The DAISY Consortium. “Inclusive Publishing Website.” https://daisy.org/activities/projects/inclusive-publishing/, Accessed 21 March 2024.

15. Accessible Books Consortium (ABC) home page. https://www. accessiblebooksconsortium.org/, Accessed 21 March 2024.

16. Benetech. “Benetech Approved Publisher Tool” https:// bornaccessible.benetech.org/global-certified-accessible/ , Accessed 21 March 2024.

17. WebAIM Web Accessibility in Mind. “The WebAIM Million: The 2023 report on the accessibility of the top 1,000,000 home pages” https://webaim.org/projects/million/ lookup?domain=sciencedirect.com, Accessed 21 March 2024.

18. GOV.UK, Service Manual. “Accessibility and assisted digital: Understanding WCAG 2.2 - WCAG 2.2 design principles” https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/helping-people-to-useyour-service/understanding-wcag, Accessed 21 March 2024.

19. Van Hoeydonck, Astrid, and Ted Gies. “Three key principles for an accessible website,” 20 June 2023. https://www.elsevier. com/en-gb/connect/three-key-principles-for-an-accessiblewebsite, Accessed 21 March 2024.