Accessibility requirements

All articles published by Cambridge are required to meet the accessibility standards outlined in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA. To ensure that material published in Cambridge journals is accessible to and understandable by all, authors should carefully consider elements such as colour use, contrast, and text clarity when preparing images and tables. For detailed guidance on image and multimedia file preparation and preferred formats, please see the Cambridge Journals Artwork Guide. 

Image, table, and multimedia descriptions: Accessibility materials must be made available for all figures, tables, and multimedia content to be published within the article, including the provision of image descriptions or “alt-text” for all figures. Authors have the opportunity to prepare their own alt-text and video/audio descriptions for all of their relevant materials and submit this to Cambridge as part of the Accessibility Descriptions Submission Form. 

As the subject expert, authors are encouraged to provide their own accessibility materials. For detailed instructions on their preparation, please see our guide to Preparing Accessible Materials. If accessibility materials are required for the publication of your article and not provided with the accepted manuscript files, these will be machine generated for you and made available to review at proof stage. The accuracy of accessibility materials is the responsibility of the author; please ensure these are checked carefully.

Labelling: All illustrative materials should be referred to in your manuscript text as “Figures”. Tables and figures must be cited in the text, must be numbered consecutively in Arabic numerals, and captions must be provided in all cases. Diagrams, graphs, maps, boxes, graphical diagrams, and code snippets must also be labelled and numbered. For further information, please see Preparing Accessible Materials.