Accessible content

On February 1st, 2023, the European Web Accessibility Directive (WAD) was officially integrated into Norwegian legislation. The WAD is a directive focused on ensuring universal design of websites within the public sector. It mandates compliance with 49 out of 78 success criteria outlined in the WCAG 2.1-standard, in addition to requiring the inclusion of an accessibility statement. For further details, please refer to FRITT’s accessibility statement (only in Norwegian). 

What does this mean for you as an editor of a FRITT-journal? 

Journal editors should know how to make their content meet the standards of accessibility; this includes both website content and published content. Website content includes all information filled out in the OJS form fields: announcements, pictures etc., while published content refers to your journals’ uploaded content, such as journal articles. Below we detail the important points of consideration in making your content meet the standards of accessibility.  

Website content 

As the journals at FRITT make use of OJS's default theme for the journal-webpages, which has been externally audited for accessibility and adheres to best practices like color contrast and keyboard navigation, there are only a couple of things to be aware of regarding your journal's website content.  

Color contrast 

To ensure that it is easy to read the information on the website, it is important to have enough contrast between text and background. This can be checked using a contrast checker, for example WebAIM: Contrast Checker. The checker will inform you on whether you have enough contrast based on the WCAG requirements. Note that for text that is a part of a logo there are no contrast requirements. 

Alternative text 

Alt-text should be used for all images that are not purely decorative, or where the text in the image is not accessible in a different part of the webpage. Alt-text describes an image so that people using screen readers can understand what is being shown. For alt-text it is important to use descriptive language, for examples, see Harvard’s webpage regarding Alt-text 

Headings 

If you have text on your webpage that includes headings (for example in “About the journal”), it is important that these are HTML-tagged. This ensures that assistive technology recognizes them as headings, allowing it to get an overview of the website content and navigate your website in the desired order. You add heading-tags in OJS by opening the source code of a text field (< > in the toolbar), check that the headings are surrounded by the appropriate hierarchical heading tags like <h2>, <h3>, etc. The title of the page (e.g., “About the journal”) is tagged with <h1>, so the headings you write yourself should start at the next level (<h2>Heading</h2>). Avoid skipping heading-levels. Read more on OJS’ webpage about heading structure. 

Hyperlinks 

It is important that link texts are descriptive, concise, and unique, so that people using screen readers can unambiguously understand the purpose of the link. The link text should be understandable without added context. “Read more information here” is not an understandable link text. See examples and read more on OJS’ webpage about accessible hyperlinks. 

Published content 

Below we will describe some of the things you can do to make your published content (e.g., journal articles, book reviews) more accessible. Some of this is information that you can communicate to your authors, for example under ‘Submission Requirements’. 

Use templates 

Create templates for the document types included in your publication and ask authors to follow your template when submitting to your journal. This way there will be less formatting work later in the process, and you can avoid having long explanations on formatting in your author guide(s). See NYU’s guide to creating LaTeX templates or Microsoft’s guide to creating Word templates. 

Headings 

Use the Styles feature in Word (or similar) to make headings, rather than manually formatting individual headings. Organize these in a logical order. If you use a template that is sent to authors, make sure the styles have pertinent and understandable names (e.g., PaperTitle, Heading1, Heading2). Find out more on Microsoft’s webpage on accessibility and headings in Word. 

Lists 

Use the Lists feature in Word to make itemized and enumerated lists. Read more on Microsoft’s webpage on lists in Word. 

Alternative text 

All illustrations, diagrams, graphs, etc., should have descriptive text. A descriptive caption is usually sufficient, but authors can in addition use alternative text. Avoid having the same text in the alt text and the caption – this will be redundant for those using a screen reader. Authors can add alt-text in Word by right-clicking on a picture and choosing “Edit Alt text”. 

Colors 

Authors need to make sure that all information communicated through colors is also available as text. When using colors, ensure there is enough contrast between the colors. See WCAG’s webpage on using color and pattern. 

Accessibility-checker 

If you are working with a Word document, you should use their Accessibility-checker. You can find this under Review > Check Accessibility. 

Converting to pdf 

To make sure elements like headings and tables are tagged correctly, choose PDF when using Save as. This should result in a tagged PDF-document. To double check that it is been done correctly, click on Options (after choosing pdf) and check whether the “Document structure tags for accessibility” is checked off. Read more on WebAIM’s webpage about converting to pdf.