The Principles

These Principles serve as a statement of our ethical values concerning accessibility within small publishing organisations. They are high level and idealistic, rather than prescriptive or technical requirements, and can serve as drivers of behaviour or justifications for decisions. They may help you to make customised plans for accessibility goals that are alternatives to compliance and go beyond the legal minimum.

1. Access has not been fully provided to a research output unless it is accessible.

2. Accessible means the research output is perceivable, operable, understandable and robust (i.e. interoperable with assistive technology).
3. All professionals involved in the production of research outputs have a part to play in achieving accessible content.

4. Scholarly communications professionals should seek to remove all barriers to access, including paywalls, accessibility barriers and others.

5. Research outputs should be born accessible by default, rather than accessible on demand or requiring a separate version that is available at a later time or through a different channel. 

6. No accessibility standard can capture the accessibility needs profile of an individual; it is therefore important to respond to individual accessibility requests.

7. Accessibility enables usability and is not just for the print disableddisabled, but is for everyone to customise their reading experience.

8. JustAccessibility foris not just aimed at humans exclusively,exclusively; accessibilityit also enables machine readability and ensures robustness/interoperability with all automated systems.

9. Accessibility helps a research output to reach its true audience, not just those who can perceive/operate/understand it, or access it.

10. Disabled people have economic disadvantages that Open Access initiatives focused on removing paywalls can help with.

11. Open access has advantages in terms of accessibility that closed access does not, in particular through the absence of DRM technology interfering with assistive technology, the prior consideration of copyright restrictions that might prevent producing accessible versions, and other lack of restrictions on re-use enabling maximised usability.