Accessibility at The White Horse Press
Overview
The White Horse Press is committed to reducing and removing barriers to access for the material we publish. After all, the best, latest thought on environment and society is relevant to everyone, without exception. This is why we’re working hard to find and implement sustainable open access publishing models for our books and journals. It’s also why we’re working to improve accessibility across all of our outputs, including publications and websites.
We are working towards compliance with the following accessibility standards and legislation:
- W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 – Level AA
- The European Accessibility Act 2025
- Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)
We have made a lot of progress in the last couple years – but we still have much work to do to make sure no potential reader is deterred or excluded. If you are hitting a particular barrier today, when trying to read White Horse Press content, then we’d like to hear from you. Please email James Rice (james@whpress.co.uk), and we’ll try our best to help.
Our general order of priorities for improving accessibility is:
- Books first, then journals, then websites.
- Current and forthcoming content first, then content published since 2018, then older back content.
- Open access content first (since it has higher readership in general), then gated content (which we hope will flip to OA anyway).
- Conventional scholarly texts first (more than 99.9% of our content), then any multimedia materials.
This page will be regularly updated as we make further progress in improving accessibility. Our Roadmap outlines more specifically how we are planning to work through the various areas.
Our Publications
The White Horse Press publishes both books and journals online.
Books
All of our books that remain in print have been released in online digital formats alongside the print editions, and this will apply to all future books. All of our online eBooks are published as DRM-free PDFs and we are prioritising this format for accessibility. In parallel, we are well progressed with deploying a new workflow for accessible ePub files for forthcoming books, and – subject to availability of time and resource – we hop in future to produce new ePub versions of back titles that do not have them. Our first new book with an accessible ePub option (WCAG 2.2 AA) was published in February 2026, and we are now aiming to make this format available for future books. Our PDFs are produced in line with the latest accessibility standards, including bookmarks, tags, navigational aids, metadata and alternative text descriptions for images.
We have prepared a Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT®) report for our eBooks. The VPAT provides detailed information about our current level of compliance with the relevant standards, in relation to our eBooks.
Previously published PDF editions have historically not been produced to this high level of accessibility. Only a small number of our PDF editions published before January 2026 have alternative text for the images; PDF editions published before 2026 may not all be tagged, hyperlinked or bookmarked. ePubs are not normally available for books published before 2026. Our roadmap details our plans and timeframe to improve these issues.
Our book frontlist is currently 100% open access, thanks in large part to support from the Open Book Collective. All of our open access eBook PDFs are hosted by Thoth and are available for download by any user anywhere in the world free of charge. Download links are available on the book’s webpage on the White Horse Press website. Since many web browsers have built-in PDF viewers, a separate PDF reader application may not be required to access the book. If the browser will not open the PDF or you require more advanced accessibility features, then we recommend downloading and installing a free PDF reader application such as Adobe Acrobat Reader. Detailed guidelines on using Adobe’s accessibility features are available on their webpage for accessibility features.
Wider dissemination of our eBooks is handled on our behalf by Thoth Open Metadata. Open access PDF editions of our books are available via a number of third-party platforms, including OAPEN, JSTOR, Project MUSE, Google Books, EBSCO eBooks, the Internet Archive and (for the benefit of visually impaired readers) RNIB Bookshare. This will be true of all forthcoming open access books, as well as all backlist books that we convert to open access in future. We will distribute our ePub editions via all candles that accept them.
Our remaining gated backlist books are hosted only on JSTOR. We are working hard to fund open access conversion for these remaining books. More information about this effort can be found on our ‘Opening our Backlist’ page. We are watching with hopeful interest as JSTOR develop new on-demand remediation technologies to improve accessibility of older PDF content.
Journals
All of our journals – including their entire backsets – are published online as DRM-free PDFs, which is the format we are prioritising for accessibility in most cases. Current and forthcoming articles for all but one title are also accessible in HTML or XML versions.
From January 2026, our article PDFs meet WCAG 2.2 AA standards of accessibility – including bookmarks, tags, navigational aids, metadata and alternative text descriptions for images – in all journals except Global Environment. Articles in Global Environment are available in accessible HTML, and the PDFs meet WCAG 2.2 AA standards in all areas except colour contrast, mainly affecting the cover page of each article. Addressing this limitation will require a complete redesign of that journal’s visual identity (see Roadmap, below).
We have prepared a Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT®) report for our journals. The VPAT provides detailed information about our current level of compliance with the relevant standards, in relation to online publication of journal articles.
Previously published PDFs of journal articles have historically not been produced to a high level of accessibility. Only a small number of our PDF editions published before January 2025 have alternative text for the images; PDF editions published before January 2025 may not be tagged, hyperlinked or bookmarked. We are currently assessing what timescale might be realistic to improve these issues. It is a large project so considerable resource will be required. Should you require an accessible version of an issue or article from before 2025, and the version already available online does not meet your needs, then please submit a request by email to james@whpress.co.uk.
Our roadmap sets out our plans for improving accessibility of back content in our journals.
Journals hosted at LUP
Three of our journals are hosted on the Liverpool University Press (LUP) website:
Articles in Environment and History and Nomadic Peoples are accessible as downloadable standards-compliant PDFs for everything published from January 2026, with partial coverage for 2025 content. Our content on the LUP site published since January 2024 is also all accessible in full-text HTML and is compliant with European Accessibility Act, WCAG standards and ADA requirements. HTML versions are not generally available for our LUP-hosted content published before 2024, though in some cases HTML abstracts are available. Article PDFs in Global Environment are mostly WCAG-compliant but have some limitations around colour contrast, so the HTML versions of these articles may be the most accessible option for some readers. JSTOR’s emerging on-demand remediation technologies may offer another option for those seeking to access articles more than five years old.
Journals hosted on OJS
The three other White Horse Press journals are hosted on an Open Journal System (OJS) installation that we operate ourselves, and which is connected with our own website. These are:
General information about the accessibility of these journals’ homepages may be found in the website section of this accessibility statement, below.
Articles on the OJS sites are accessible as downloadable standards-compliant PDFs for everything published from January 2026, with partial coverage for 2025 content. In addition to PDF, most current and forthcoming content hosted on our OJS sites (i.e. everything since January 2024, but excluding ‘The Journal of Population and Sustainability’) is accessible as reflowable HTML. We are currently developing an HTML workflow for ‘The Journal of Population and Sustainability’, and anticipate that this will be live by April 2026. HTML/XML versions are not generally available for our OJS-hosted content published before 2024; however, we note that only ‘The Journal of Population and Sustainability’ and ‘Worldwide Waste’ have back content older than that.
Metadata
The metadata in our PDF files published from January 2026 onwards (for both books and journals) is up to date and follows industry best practice and guidance. As we develop new ePub and/or HTML workflows for future, we will apply best practice to accessibility metadata in that context as well. Our roadmap sets out our plans for improving accessibility metadata for our back content.
Beginning in March 2026, we will distribute publication accessibility metadata for our eBooks in the ONIX records that are sent to various suppliers and vendors via Thoth Open Metadata.
Image Descriptions (alternative text/alt text)
Alt text is a short textual description accompanying illustrations and figures in books, which is embedded digitally into the image for use in our PDF editions, and is used by assistive technologies (such as screen readers) to convey the type and content of the image to readers with visual impairments who otherwise would not be able to read the standard captions accompanying images in publications.
We introduced alt text into our standard publishing workflow for journals in January 2025 and for books in September 2025. We now ask authors to create alt text when they submit their manuscripts for final production, and our editorial team then checks the alt text for quality assurance and revises it as necessary prior to publication. Where authors will not or cannot provide alt text, we draft it ourselves.
For articles including mathematical formulae or expressions of formal logic, from January 2026 we will require the author to provide suitable alt text in LaTeX or MathML format to enable those using screen readers to follow the equation in full detail.
For graphs and charts, we provide as much informational value as possible in the alt text, but we do not currently include long descriptions alongside the alt text.
Testing
All of our books and journals, beginning in Q4 2025, will go through detailed accessibility checks during production by external suppliers and in-house staff. This list is not exhaustive, but the checks that we carry out on our files include:
- Accessibility checks in Acrobat Pro for PDF compliance with WCAG 2.2 AA and other relevant standards, plus additional manual checks to ensure compliance.
- ACE by Daisy for accessibility checks in ePubs.
Multimedia Content
Less than 0.01% of our online publications include multimedia content.
For those that do, the majority do not contain the content embedded within the text, but rather link out to content hosted on an external website. We have limited control, if any, over the preparation and hosting of such content. We strongly encourage authors and other content providers to make externally hosted audio-visual content compliant with the relevant standards, but we cannot guarantee it.
In the rare cases where we embed multimedia content into our PDFs or ePubs, or where we host supplementary audio-visual files that are formally part of a published article, we are aiming to meet accessibility standards to the greatest extent possible from January 2027. Our ability to do so will depend case-by-case on the technical characteristics of each piece, which vary widely, in the context of our available knowledge and resource.
Our Websites
Our main website includes HTML pages we maintain ourselves, plus a number of pages and posts created in WordPress. There are also multiple ancillary submission sites for our journals, as well as pages on Liverpool University Press’s website, where three of our journals are hosted.
We use SortSite to test and monitor the accessibility of our websites.
Our main HTML site is mostly accessible as of November 2025. There a few standards issues with third party code embedded in our site (for example, from Google), which we do not have the ability to control. We are aiming to resolve any remaining issues that are within our control in the near future.
Our pages driven by the OJS are mostly accessible, requiring a few fixes that we are actively working to correct as of November 2025.
We use both SortSite and Equalize Digital Accessibility Checker to test and monitor the accessibility of our WordPress pages and posts. As of November 2025, we have begun a site-wide review across all our WordPress content. We will complete this review and to the best of our ability rectify any issues it reveals in 2026. Our current understanding is that simple posts and pages are mostly accessible, whereas pages and posts relying on certain plugins tend to have more barriers to accessibility. As these plugins are in some cases essential for our ability to trade, we need to undertake careful research into alternatives before making a change. In late 2025 we completed a process to remediate old images on the website by adding alt text.
The accessibility of our journal homepages and associated issue and article pages at LUP is managed and maintained by LUP. LUP and Atypon work to a high standard in regard to accessibility. General information about the accessibility of LUP’s site, which also contains extensive other material not published by The White Horse Press, may be found on LUP’s Accessibility page and in their website VPAT. LUP’s site is powered by Atypon, whose own accessibility statement outlines their practice in this area, including an across-the-board commitment to WCAG 2.2 AA compliance.
Roadmap
Frontlist Publications
| Area | Status | Comments | Timeline |
|---|---|---|---|
| Books | In progress | Adding a new workflow to create accessible ePub, as an additional option alongside our primary PDF editions, is currently in testing and roll-out phase. | April 2026 |
| Journals | In progress | Technical aspects of bringing our PDF versions of record into full compliance have been assessed across all our journals, and this is being rolled out for new journal content from January 2026. | January 2026 |
| Journals | In progress | Resolving colour contrast limitations in ‘Global Environment’ will require a wholesale re-design of the journal’s visual identity. We will aim to undertake this when it’s possible to free up sufficient budget to do so. Meanwhile, new content in this journal is available as accessible HTML on LUP’s site. | TBC |
| Journals | In progress | Adding an HTML workflow for ‘The Journal of Population and Sustainability’ is currently under investigation. Meanwhile, we are finalising processes to make sure the PDFs in this journal meet accessibility standards. | December 2026 |
Backlist Publications
| Area | Status | Comments | Timeline |
|---|---|---|---|
| Books | Pending | Work is being in Spring 2026, including through proof of concept work with a technical vendor. Implementation timeline will depend on required cost and other resource, but is expected to take a number of years. Priority will be given to content published since 2018. | Scoping in Spring 2026; implementation timeframe TBC but we are hoping for completion by 2030, in view of the large scale of the project relative to our limited resource. |
| Journals | Pending | Work is being in Spring 2026, including through proof of concept work with a technical vendor. Implementation timeline will depend on required cost and other resource required, but is expected to take several years. Priority will be given to content published since 2018. | Scoping in Spring 2026; implementation timeframe TBC but we are hoping for completion by 2035, in view of the enormous scale of the project relative to our resource. |
Websites
| Area | Status | Comments | Timeline |
|---|---|---|---|
| General | In progress | Reviews of our web estate are being completed on a rolling basis in 2026, with issues arising dealt with as we go, where feasible, or added to a longer term plan where necessary. | April 2026 |
| Plugins | Pending | We need to research alternatives to certain plugins that are causing some problems on our WordPress pages. This will require technical changes affecting our core business so we will proceed, but cautiously. | December 2027 |
Other Areas
| Area | Status | Comments | Timeline |
|---|---|---|---|
| Metadata | In progress | Accessibility metadata will be included in our ONIX feed for eBooks. Currently being implemented by Thoth Open Metadata, completion expected by March 2026. | March 2026 |
| Multimedia | Pending | This is relevant to only a tiny proportion of our publications and is thus a lower priority for attention. We aim to comply with accessibility standards for embedded or in-house-hosted multimedia content by end 2028. This will require case by case investigation of feasibility in each particular case. We are not able to guarantee accessibility compliance for content we link to on external websites. | January 2028 |
This accessibility statement was prepared on 22 October 2025. It was last updated on 16 February 2026.