Accessibility statement
This is an accessibility statement from The Royal Society of Chemistry.
- Any reference to ‘We’,‘Us’ and ‘Our’ is to The Royal Society of Chemistry as an organisation.
- Any reference to ‘Our products’ is to websites available within the rsc.org domain.
- Any reference to ‘You’,Your’ is to you as an individual user of Our websites.
Our commitment to accessibility
We recognise the importance of valuing all members of our community. We believe that for the chemical sciences to prosper, they must attract, develop and retain a diverse range of talented people.
As a professional and membership body, and a leading voice for the chemistry community, we have a responsibility to promote inclusivity and accessibility in order to improve diversity.
Our goal is to increase the diversity of people choosing and fulfilling their potential in the chemical sciences for a truly inclusive community.
Our commitment to inclusion and diversity, and science culture more broadly, is embedded throughout our strategy and our activities. Read more about our work.
We take the following measures to ensure that our products and services are accessible:
- Include accessibility within our internal policies.
- Integrate accessibility into our procurement practices.
- Provide accessibility training for our staff.
- Assign clear accessibility goals for new initiatives.
- Employ formal accessibility quality assurance methods.
- Partner with accessibility experts for advice and testing.
Conformance status
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) defines requirements for designers and developers to improve accessibility for people with disabilities. It defines three levels of conformance: Level A, Level AA, and Level AAA. Our products are partially conformant with WCAG 2.2 level AA. Partially conformant means that some parts of the content do not fully conform to the accessibility guidelines.
Additional accessibility conformance standards for publications
- PDF/UA (ISO 14289-1) for accessible PDF documents.
- EPUB Accessibility 1.1 (aligned with WCAG and DAISY Consortium guidelines) for accessible EPUB content.
Compatibility with browsers and assistive technology
We test our products with the following assistive technologies:
- Chrome with NVDA on Windows.
- Safari with VoiceOver on MacOS and iOS.
- Chrome with TalkBack on Android.
- Thorium with the inbuilt reader for EPUBs.
- Adobe reader with NVDA for PDFs on Windows.
- Adobe reader with VoiceOver for PDFs on MacOS.
Assessment approach
We assessed the accessibility of our products using audits provided by Testlio, which also provides ongoing training and reviews of remediation efforts.
How accessible are our products?
Some parts of our products are not fully accessible yet. For example:
- Some links do not have discernible names.
- Some links rely on colour to be distinguishable.
- Some elements have poor colour contrast.
- Some heading elements are not consistent.
- Some images do not have image descriptions.
- Some documents in PDF format and are not fully accessible.
- Some elements lack the appropriate ARIA tags.
We recognise these current issues and are working to correct them.
This statement was prepared on 12/07/2025. It was last reviewed on 24/11/2025.
Feedback
Please contact us if you are experiencing problems with using any of our products. This will enable us to support you, recognise issues and prioritise the improvements we make.