Celebrating progress in accessible product design, metadata innovation, and partnerships—while advancing our commitment to ‘born accessible’ practices and preparing for new global standards.
In our previous accessibility update, we outlined our commitment to striving for accessibility in our Clarivate Academia & Government products. At that time, we announced the centralized Accessibility Directory and our plans in preparation for growing global regulations. Over the past eight months, we’ve made meaningful strides across teams, products, and content workflows.
Spotlighting a few product milestones
Providing accessible experiences remains central to our planning. As we elevate our focus, our attention is on developing inclusive experiences and enhancing the underlying features of our products to enable accessibility.
Accessibility Metadata for ebooks
Accessibility metadata plays an important role in making digital content usable. It helps users understand what a resource offers – and enables them to identify material that fits their needs. We’ve been working closely with our publisher partners to provide accessibility metadata for ebooks. Today, accessibility metadata can be searched by admins on LibCentral and is provided in the book details for titles on Ebook Central.
We’re looking at how to bring accessibility metadata to other key products in our product platforms. To do this, we’re examining industry standards, and exploring how richer accessibility metadata could improve discoverability and usability for various content types.
EPUB preferred as the default display on Ebook Central
A key update in our ebook portfolio is the transition to EPUB format as the default reading experience. EPUB is an HTML-based, reflowable format that adapts to screen size and device, and better supports assistive technologies such as screen readers. We continue to provide books in a PDF format, when available, and users can easily switch between formats if needed.
Design improvements
We’ve been working to integrate important design improvements for accessibility for many of our products. For example, several products, such as the Web of Science, have refined color usage for interactive elements, enhancing visual cues so that color isn’t the only means of conveying information.
Strengthening our accessibility culture and practices
Shifting Left and moving to “born accessible”
To deliver on our accessibility goals, we’re actively shifting our accessibility efforts earlier in the product lifecycle – moving to a “born accessible” mindset. Our teams receive targeted training on accessibility, and accessibility is included in release criteria early on. We’re expanding our tooling and test protocols to provide more consistent reviews and identify potential accessibility barriers earlier on in development.
While these process improvements mark real progress, we still don’t yet have full coverage across all products or workflows. Achieving a shift to “born accessible” across all our products will take time and continued focus, which we’re committed to advancing steadily. Read more about Inclusive Development: A Key Standard for Product Innovation at Clarivate.
Growing accessibility partnerships
We’re deepening our collaboration across the ecosystem by partnering with organizations such as the DAISY Consortium’s Inclusive Publishing Partners initiative, and the International Association of Accessibility Professionals. Through these partnerships, we’re engaging in industry discussions to further accessibility throughout the publishing ecosystem.
Some of what’s ahead this year
While we have a lot in motion, we want to highlight a few key initiatives as we look ahead.
Improving availability of Accessibility roadmaps
Accessibility Roadmaps are currently available for products by request for more information on planned work and accessibility improvements in the pipeline. We’re actively working to make roadmaps more easily available, and plan to publish to the Accessibility Directory. These documents provide high-level tracking of known issues and timeframes for remediation.
Known issue portal for Primo NDE
We’re working to add accessibility issues into the new Known Issue Portal for Primo NDE to provide visibility into known accessibility issues. The portal is still in development; our aim is for users to see which accessibility items are outstanding and scheduled for later fixes. As we get more user feedback, there are plans to expand the Known Issue Portal to other product groups.
Ongoing product remediation and feature enhancements
Accessibility is ongoing and continuous work for our product teams. Many products are actively undergoing reviews to identify and remediate known issues, while new development is benefiting from deeper testing and integration. At the same time – we’re exploring future feature enhancements – enriched accessibility metadata, AI-supported workflows, and content capabilities to increase accessibility across the user experience and digital resources.
Working on community feedback
The Clarivate Accessibility Council is a cross-functional team working to increase accessibility resources and capabilities across our products and services.
For general information or questions, please contact accessibility@clarivate.com.
