General statement

Inter-Research Science Publisher is committed to providing a website that is accessible to all users, following the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 AA developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (WC3). As Inter-Research sits solely within Germany, the relevant framework is legally set by the European Accessibility Act (EAA) and the German Barrierefreiheitsstärkungsgesetz (BFSG). With content created across 25 years of rapidly evolving technology and changing standards, achieving and maintaining current accessibility compliance across the whole platform is not quick or straightforward. Hence, we continuously work to improve our content's accessibility standards.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 AA

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 AA are based on the following four main principles:

• Perceivable: Information and user interface components must be presentable to users in ways they can perceive.
• Operable: User interface components and navigation must be operable.
• Understandable: Information and the operation of the user interface must be understandable.
• Robust: Content must be robust enough that it can be interpreted by a wide variety of user agents, including assistive technologies.

Platform (website)

An assessment of platform compliancy under WCAG 2.0 AA and the USA Revised Section 508 Standards is provided in the Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT^®) document: VPAT report (PDF). Inter-Research aims for WCAG 2.2 AA compliance and the VPAT^® documentation for it is in preparation.

The VPAT^® document is updated annually to reflect improvements and changes implemented throughout the last year. You can download the Inter-Research roadmap for more detailed information.

Journals

From July 2025 onwards, the provision of Alt Texts where appropriate is standard practice for all newly published journal articles, along with improvements and consistency in other accessibility features. For articles published before July 2025 the level of accessibility varies based on publication date. Unfortunately, there is currently no filter in place to easily identify available accessibility features for pre-July 2025 publications.

eBooks

From January 2026 onwards, all newly published eBook content will have a logical reading order and heading structure, sufficient colour contrasts and easy-to-read fonts. The eBooks are available in pub format. For eBooks published prior to January 2026, accessibility varies to publication date.

PDF (Journal Article) Accessibility back-processing

In the late 2000s, the entire print era (pre digital publication) back-catalogue was added to the website in the form of PDF scans of the printed volumes to make the entire Inter-Research output centrally accessible to the scientific community in general. Inter-Research, a small family-owned publisher, is committed to PDF accessibility for future content, but with ca. 22 000 PDFs of content created over 45+ years to re-process and/or re-create (in many cases technologically challenging due to non-existent base digital files and archaic software incompatibility) within a 9-fold smaller timeframe, in addition to maintaining the level of new publication, is an impossible burden. New content to be added to the PDFs such as Alt Texts are best written by the original authors, many of whom are no longer alive or accessible. Emerging assistive technologies such as AI are not yet capable at the complexity level of graphics and information presented in academic research. At the present time Inter-Research is not able to commit to modifying the historic content, based on a thorough evaluation of cost and resources, though this will be regularly reviewed.

To ensure accessibility of future published content we work with authors to provide alternative texts, as no one can describe their research as well as the authors themselves. For detailed instructions please refer to the Alt Text section in our Author Guidelines.

Your feedback and input is important for us. Please reach out to our Customer Support with any accessibility related questions, feedback or assistance you need.