Our commitment
International Health serves a global professional audience — field epidemiologists, NGO and MSF logisticians, public-health procurement officers, tropical-medicine researchers, and immunization-program planners — who reach our content across an unusually wide range of devices, connection speeds, and assistive technologies. Accessibility is not a courtesy here; it is a precondition for the editorial work being useful at all.
We aim to conform to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 at Level AA, the standard referenced by most public institutions and the practical baseline for content intended to be read, cited, and acted upon in low-resource settings. We treat these guidelines as field-tested editorial judgment applied to the page rather than a checkbox exercise.
Standards we hold ourselves to
Our ongoing work is organised around the four WCAG principles, each interpreted for the realities of how our readers actually access the publication:
- Perceivable — Text alternatives accompany informative images, charts, and equipment photography so that a reader using a screen reader, or one who has disabled images to conserve bandwidth, still receives the substance of an assessment. Colour is never the sole carrier of meaning in our cold-chain, diagnostics, outbreak-response, and WASH guides — a temperature-excursion flag or a pass/fail grade is always conveyed in text as well.
- Operable — Every interactive element — navigation, in-article links, the language switcher, search — is reachable and usable by keyboard alone, without a pointing device. We avoid time-limited interactions and motion that cannot be paused, since both fail readers on intermittent connections and those sensitive to vestibular triggers.
- Understandable — We write plainly and define specialist procurement and epidemiology vocabulary (cold chain, RDT, point-of-care, WASH, WHO PQS, high-consequence pathogen) where a non-specialist reader might first encounter it. Page structure is consistent across the four-pillar editorial sections so that navigation behaves predictably.
- Robust — Our pages use semantic, valid markup so that current and future assistive technologies — screen readers, magnifiers, voice-control software, refreshable braille displays — can interpret them reliably rather than guessing at structure.
Accommodations in place
The following are part of the publication today, and are maintained as part of our editorial production rather than bolted on:
- Logical heading hierarchy on every article and guide, so screen-reader and braille-display users can navigate by structure.
- Descriptive link text — never a bare "read more" or "click here" — so links remain meaningful when surfaced out of context by assistive tools.
- Text that reflows and remains legible when enlarged up to 200% without horizontal scrolling, for low-vision readers and small handset screens alike.
- Colour and contrast chosen to meet WCAG AA contrast ratios for body text and interface elements.
- Visible keyboard focus indicators, so a keyboard-only reader can always see where they are on the page.
- Alternative text on informative imagery, and decorative imagery marked so it is skipped by assistive technology rather than read aloud as noise.
- A lightweight, low-bandwidth-tolerant page structure — a deliberate editorial choice for readers on metered, satellite, or congested connections.
Known limitations
We hold ourselves to candour here as in our equipment assessments. Some archived material predating the current editorial rebuild — including legacy article PDFs and figures carried over from the publication's earlier life — may not yet meet our current accessibility targets. Where a historic figure or scanned document lacks an adequate text alternative, we will provide an equivalent on request while we work through remediation. Third-party embeds, where used, are held to the same WCAG AA expectation, and we remove or replace any that fall short.
Reporting an accessibility barrier
If any part of International Health is difficult to read, navigate, or use with your assistive technology — or if you need a specific article, figure, or dataset provided in an alternative format — we want to hear about it, and we treat such reports with the same seriousness as a correction to the editorial record.
Please contact our editorial team at [email protected], or through our contact page. To help us respond precisely, it is useful — though never required — to include the page address, the assistive technology or browser you were using, and a short description of the barrier you encountered. We aim to acknowledge accessibility reports promptly and to keep you informed as we work toward a fix.
Ongoing review
Accessibility is maintained as part of routine editorial production, not a one-time audit. We review conformance as the publication evolves, fold accessibility into how new guides and reviews are authored, and update this statement as our practice changes. This commitment is part of the same standard we apply to the equipment we evaluate: graded for the field, not the catalog.