Our Commitment to Accessibility
Princeton University Press’s primary mission is to bring scholarly ideas to the world. We embrace the highest standards of inclusivity and diversity in our publishing. As part of our mission, PUP is actively making our content in all formats as accessible as possible to the widest possible audience, including people with print disabilities.
Princeton University Press has signed the Publishing Accessibility Action Group UK (PAAG) and Accessible Books Consortium (ABC) charters.
We guide ourselves by the standards and specifications defined by W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1, including W3C’s EPUB 3.3 Recommendation and W3C’s EPUB 1.1 Conformance and Discoverability Requirements. These in turn lead to conformance with the following regulations:
- The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which provides civil rights to Americans with disabilities in many areas including communications.
- The European Accessibility Act (EAA), which enters into force in the European Union in June 28, 2025.
- American federal law Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, which requires agencies to provide individuals with disabilities equal access to electronic information and data comparable to those who do not have disabilities.
We strive to ensure that our published works follow these principles:
- Content is structured in a clear, coherent reading order and semantically tagged for easy and logical navigation.
- Color when used is high contrast for easy readability.
- MathML is used for equations, which renders them readable by assistive technology.
- Passages are tagged in non-English languages so that screen readers can pronounce them properly.
- We are working to include both alternative text (alt text) for images and accessibility information in our metadata.
ebook Conversions
For all ebook conversions, we proudly work with vendors who are accredited by Benetech’s Global Certified Accessible program.
In 2023, we began checking newly published EPUBs met accessibility requirements with Ace Accessibility Checker from the DAISY Consortium.
In July 2024, we began to provide accessibility metadata from ONIX Code List 196 to our ONIX recipient partners.
In early 2024, we began remediating a selection of existing published ebook files to meet modern accessibility standards, prioritizing books used by students in courses. Due to the costs, complexity, and scale of our existing publication list, this project will continue in years to come.
Please email accessibility@press.princeton.edu if you have a request for a fully accessible epub3 edition; we will review requests as part of our accessibility roadmap.
Alternative Formats
Princeton University Press does not directly distribute digital files to institutions or individual students. To best serve the needs of students with print disabilities, we have partnered with organisations specialising in accessibility services.
- For U.S. academic institutions seeking an alternative format for a student, please contact Bookshare.
- For U.K. requestors, please contact the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB).
- For Canadian requestors, please contact the Centre for Equitable Library Access (CELA).
- For requests from the rest of the world, please contact permissions@press.princeton.edu.
Website Accessibility Tools
Princeton University Press partners with Princeton University to utilize the Editoria11y Drupal accessibility module and DubBot website accessibility checker. The Press also employs other various development and accessibility tools and techniques to ensure alignment with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA.
Contact Us
This work is ongoing. We welcome your feedback at accessibility@press.princeton.edu.
Last updated and effective as of November 4th, 2024