Accessibility Statement

New Left Review has always aimed to make its website accessible to the widest possible range of users. This statement provides accessibility information about that website.

Contrast

NLR aims to choose high contrast colour combinations which make different website elements easily discernible, and enable easy reading. Some archival content may have legacy colour data that has not yet been thoroughly checked; please let us know if you encounter any difficulties discerning elements or reading the NLR site, and we will endeavour to correct the relevant content immediately. There are also various techniques for adjusting colours and contrast in your own browser.

Web Standards

The NLR website was built using valid HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript to the standards laid out in the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1) - Level AA, and we refer to these guidelines in ongoing maintenance and updates.

The NLR website has been built to be usable and readable without dependence on any special technology: we work to principles of "progressive enhancement", and the entire site should function well even in text-only browsers or browsers without JavaScript enabled. The sole exception is the Stripe card payment integration, which unavoidably depends on JavaScript, but this JavaScript itself adheres to WAI-ARIA standards.

The NLR website should thus work well with assistive technologies such as screen readers. But let us know if you do encounter difficulties using the site with any such device and we will do our best to solve the problem quickly.

Auditing

NLR has had its website reviewed systematically by web accessibility and user experience experts in order to ensure adherence to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and will conduct further such reviews for any updates that have a potential bearing on accessibility.

What we do about known issues

While the structure of the NLR website itself adheres to WCAG 2.1 AA standards, it presents an archive of thousands of articles, covering a period of 6 decades, much of which was digitized in the 1990s, making it hard to absolutely guarantee accessibility for that archival content. However, since that content is made up entirely of scholarly articles, stored using a standard format for scholarly publications it is probable that any issues even with very old content will remain minor.

If we discover an accessibility problem with archival content, we will aim to fix it as quickly as possible, and we invite users to inform us if we have missed anything. Feedback from users on this level will always be gratefully received.

Contacting Us

Please do contact us if you have any problems. It helps us to identify and fix problems if you are as specific and detailed as possible. We will typically respond within a couple of working days.

Known Issues

As part of our commitment to improving accessibility, we publish all issues identified in our audits here.

Alt text on article figures

Article figure alt attribute content is auto-generated, limiting its descriptive quality.

Due to the mass of archival content and the constraints of the scholarly archive format we use, supplying custom descriptive alt attributes for article figures is no small task. However, it is the nature of such figures that they are typically already described in surrounding text. We are currently investigating options for improving article figure alt text.

Last Updated

This page was last updated on 14 August 2020.