Accessibility

 

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines

De Gruyter Brill is working towards conforming with level AA of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.2 and Section 508 Standards of the U.S. Federal Accessibility Standard for brill.com.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) standards are set by World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the main international standards organization for the Internet. These guidelines are widely accepted as the gold standards for digital accessibility and serve as the basis of most accessibility regulations worldwide.

The Section 508 Standards were established to implement Section 508 of the U.S. Rehabilitation Act, which requires government agencies to provide access to electronic and information technologies for disabled individuals that is comparable to access available to non-disabled individuals.

 

Our approach

Accessibility is at the core of our platform development.

We endeavour that all features and functionality on the brill.com platform are developed in line with WCAG 2.2 guidelines. Automated and manual testing is conducted to ensure new features and functionality conform to accessibility guidelines.

We aim to be open and transparent about what is not working well on our platform. We try to resolve known issues as quickly as possible.

A full accessibility audit of the brill.com platform is conducted periodically to ensure it conforms to the current international accessibility guidelines. Any issues discovered are assessed and prioritized accordingly in our development roadmap.

Feedback is welcomed from users to notify us of any accessibility issues they find. Your feedback helps us to improve brill.com. Please see below for contact options.

 

Brill.com Accessibility Conformance Report

For a detailed review of how brill.com supports the WCAG 2.2 and Section 508 criteria, please refer to our most recent accessibility conformance report (based on VPAT v2.5).

This Report was created October 27, 2025 and will be updated in regular intervals.

 

Accessibility status of brill.com

We want as many people as possible to be able to use this website and our content. You should be able to:

  • Zoom in up to 300% without the text spilling off the screen
  • Navigate most of the website using just a keyboard
  • Navigate most of the website using speech recognition software
  • Listen to most of the website using a screen reader

The website is accessible for:

  • Usage with limited or no vision or perception of colour
  • Usage with limited or no hearing, and with no or limited vocal capability
  • Usage with limited reach

Recommended Browser

Google Chrome / Microsoft Edge

Evaluation methods used for accessibility testing

  • The website was tested with assistive technologies (including screen reader, screen magnification, contrast switching, keyboard, speech recognition)
  • Testing with automated accessibility tools, such as:
  • Freedom Scientific JAWS 2025,
  • Freedom Scientific ZoomText 2025,
  • Microsoft Windows accessibility features,
  • and keyboard-only control.
  • NVDA 2025.3
  • Lighthouse

Keyboard navigation

The TAB key can be used to navigate through links within the site menu and the main text of each page. Once a link has been highlighted, use the ENTER key to activate the link.

Headers

Our content pages use structured headers to aid legibility of the text. The first header on the page is the main content header followed by any appropriate sub-headers.

Changing the text size

Most browsers will allow you to change the font size. This will be reflected on the site.

Alternative content

For visitors using screen reader or speech browser software, we've provided sensible alternative text for most of the images where this alternative text will aid your understanding of the web page.

Tables

We are using tables for the display of tabular data. For users of screen readers and speech browsers, we associate headers with their respective rows and columns to aid legibility.

Magnification and Reflow

Text can be resized without assistive technology up to 300 percent without loss of content or functionality.

Copy and Printing

All content on brill.com is DRM-free. Printing or copying text through browser functionality is possible. Please keep in mind that copyright conditions apply and can be found in our Terms and Conditions. For details on permitted uses of the content, please contact our Rights Team at: brill-rights@degruyterbrill.com

PDF files

To open PDF files, you need a PDF viewer such as Adobe Reader. Adobe provides advice on Adobe Reader’s accessibility features.

Detailed content and access options

Brill.com is the information source for anyone wanting to find information about services of the publisher De Gruyter Brill. Brill.com is the publishing platform electronic book, journal and online resources content originally published by Brill.

As such, brill.com hosts content from journals, books and online resources.

Journals

Our journals are available in HTML and PDF format. Journal content from before 2012 as well as content from some current journals is only available in PDF format. All PDFs can be downloaded from our website and viewed in a PDF viewer.

Most tables in HTML articles are compatible with screen readers and other assistive technologies. Some older content may not include alternative text for images.

Since PDF standards have changed over the years, older PDFs may not be accessible through screen readers or other assistive technologies.

Books

Our books are offered in PDF and HTML (for metadata, and for books since 2010). Book chapters can be downloaded individually in PDF. All PDF files are downloadable from our website.

Since PDF standards have changed over the years, older PDFs may not be accessible through screen readers or other assistive technologies.

Online Resources

Our Online Resources are available in HTML. Some products, which are based on print products, additionally feature a PDF-download option for the original text.

All tables are compatible with screen readers and other assistive technologies. Relevant alternative texts are provided for all figures.

European Accessibility Act

New book titles published from June 28, 2025, onward are available in accessible formats.

These include:

  • PDF/UA-compliant files for the entire book as well as each chapter

These publications include:

  • Alternative texts for figures
  • Semantic markup of all structural elements (e.g., titles, headings, paragraphs, footnotes)
  • Accessibility information in the metadata (PDF metadata)

This means that our publications meet the requirements of the European Accessibility Act (EAA) and the standards for accessible documents (ISO 14289-1 / PDF/UA).

For the past two years, an internal working group at De Gruyter Brill has been working towards the optimal implementation of these standards – in close coordination with the editorial departments and taking into account established scientific publishing processes. Our goal is to ensure maximum accessibility. However, due to the complexity of some individual titles, there may be exceptions where not all accessibility features can be fully implemented. In such cases, we still mark as many elements as possible as accessible and only resort to publishing a non-accessible title in exceptional cases.

 

Contact us

Should you experience any difficulty with accessibility on brill.com, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with our support team. We aim to respond within 3 business days.

 

This page was last updated: 05 February 2026

 

Below is an overview of all accessibility statements of Brill platforms.