IOP eBooks

This assessment covers the IOP Science eBooks application. Overall, there are very few issues for accessibility unveiled by this assessment, and our audit even found areas where we were pleasantly surprised with very accessible implementations, such as the tabpanels in the book details page. The application still shows some issues for accessibility however.

Top 3 Issues:

1. Headings not marked up as such – A lot of the headings in the pages are presented visually as such but lack the expected semantic structure in HTML to convey the same information to screen reader users and users of other types of assistive technologies. This will cause users to miss out on key information and cause them to struggle more than necessary to make sense of the content of each page.
2. Untagged PDF documents – PDF documents in the application appear to be untagged, which is a major problem for accessibility, as screen reader users have no way to efficiently navigate through them. This is a serious matter, but also a very complicated one, as remediation of PDF documents means a lot of resources and efforts spent (that may be well beyond the control of the platform).
3. Inconsistent heading structure – Most pages rely on a heading structure that skips levels and can cause confusion for users who cannot see the screen. Reviewing the heading structure of the documents to use a more hierarchically sound outline would help with navigation.