Accessibility Statement

Brill Platform Aspire Badge: Gold 88

 

 

for the websites of Brill Germany GmbH:
www.schoeningh.de | www.fink.de | www.mentis.de

 

Brill with the imprints Ferdinand Schöningh, Wilhelm Fink und mentis is committed to ensure our websites are easily accessible for everyone. By adopting best practices and striving to adhere to current guidelines and recommendations we are continuously working towards improving accessibility.Wherever possible, Brill strives to comply with

  • Section 508 Amendment to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, EN 201 549 Accessibility requirements suitable for public procurement of ICT products and services in Europe – v2.1.2 (2018-08)
  • level AA of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG2.1).

 

Table of contents:

Accessibility of the websites
Available formats
Copy and Printing
Browser and mobile device support
How accessible this website is
What to do if you cannot access parts of this website
Reporting accessibility problems with this website
Technical information about this website's accessibility
How we test this website
What we are doing to improve accessibility

 
Accessibility of the websites
We want as many people as possible to be able to use this website. For example, that means you should be able to:

  • change colors, contrast levels and fonts. Different browsers include these options under different menus – they can usually be found under Tools, Settings, Options, Content or Reading View depending on the browser.
  • zoom in up to 300% without loss of content or functionality
  • navigate most of the website using just a keyboard
  • use text to speech tools to read out website content (e.g. ClaroRead for Chrome browser). Text to speech tools are built into some browsers (e.g. Microsoft Edge) and are available as a plug-in for many others. Your phone, tablet or laptop accessibility settings are also likely to provide text to speech functionality
  • locate a web page within a set of pages in more than one way.

We’ve also made the website text as simple as possible to understand.
For guidance in making your computer more accessible, we recommend the AbilityNet website. This provides help with seeing the screen, using keyboard and mouse, hearing sounds and reading and spelling.

Available formats
Most of our content is available in both PDF and HTML format and are not protected by Digital Rights Management (DRM). To open PDF files, you need a PDF viewer such as Adobe Reader. Adobe provides advice on the inbuilt accessibility features here: Reading PDFs with reflow and accessibility features.

Copy and Printing
The absence of Digital Rights Management software on our platform means assistive technology users should experience no barriers caused by print or copy restrictions – however normal copyright conditions still apply and can be found in our Terms and Conditions.

Browser and mobile device support
Our websites are optimized for modern browsers including Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari and Google Chrome. You may experience unexpected behavior in other browsers, although we use fully validated code which should work on any browser.
Our websites are is responsive, it re-organizes itself depending on the screen size and orientation of the device being used to view it. We test the experience on various devices including most popular IOS, Android and MS Windows phones and tablets.

How accessible this website is
The majority of this website is fully accessible, and we run regular audits to identify any new problems. However, we know some parts of this website are not fully accessible:

  • Some of our content in PDF format has not been designed for accessibility. This includes for example older archive content reproduced from original printed sources.
  • Heading use within content is not always consistent and not always useful for navigation.
  • Form fields are not always appropriately labeled.
  • Instructions and errors for the forms are also not programmatically associated with the forms.
  • Some parts of the website are not very easy to navigate using keyboard (e.g. when the site is viewed at high magnification, essential navigation collapses into non-keyboard navigable elements).
  • Some non-essential interactions are indicated with low-contrast color differentials.
  • A number of images within HTML format content don’t include alt tags but most include adjacent description.
  • The site can be switched to alternate language, and the language of the page is set correctly. However, the language conversion doesn’t modify all of the site functionality, and screen readers seem to auto-detect the site as English, overriding the site setting. This might be configurable for an individual screen reader user.
  • Any given page may contain bilingual information. Page subsections, especially those provided by the content editors, do not have language identifiers, which causes unusual behavior for screen readers.

What to do if you cannot access parts of this website
We now publish most of our new titles in accessible E-Book format. In case a title is unavailable in a suitable format you can enquire this via our Accessibility Officer (accessibility@brill.com). We will consider your request and aim to get back to you in 5-7 working days.

Reporting accessibility problems with this website
We are always looking to improve the accessibility of this website. If you find any problems not listed on this page or think we’re not meeting accessibility requirements, please contact our Accessibility Officer at accessibility@brill.com.

Technical information about this website’s accessibility
This website is partially compliant with the „Web Content Accessibility Guidelines“, version 2.1 AA standard, due to the non-compliances listed in the report attached below.

We have commissioned an independent Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) report to help us understand where we can improve accessibility of this website. The latest report can be downloaded below. As we improve the accessibility of our website, we will provide updated VPATs on this page.

Download VPAT - 15 July 2019 (PDF)

How we test this website
We regularly test our website against the current guidelines and recommendations and prioritize any actions that derived from testing on our development roadmap.

What we are doing to improve accessibility
The majority of our website is already accessible for most users. We are continuously working on improving the experience for all our users and have identified the areas below for further improvements:

  • Improve use of headings to correctly organize content
  • Ensure all form fields are labelled appropriately
  • Ensure the logical tab order corresponds to the visual order for the main site navigation
  • Fully support keyboard operability
  • Ensure navigation links (for example “Skip to main content”) are visible to keyboard and magnification users
  • Improve instructions and suggestions for form errors


This statement was prepared on 23 January 2020. It was last updated on 11 May 2020.