Springer Nature is committed to making our content as accessible as possible to everyone, including those with visual, hearing, cognitive and motor impairments. We're constantly improving the accessibility of our website and digital content to ensure we provide equal access for all our users. As part of this, we have certain requirements for authors so that your manuscript content is accessible.
Images
Alternative text
Alternative text (“alt text”) is a written description of an image that conveys its meaning. It is different to a caption, which typically provides additional information not already present in the visual element itself. Alt text is an important part of making published content more accessible:
- Alt text supports readers with visual impairments who rely on assistive technologies such as screen readers.
- Alt text can describe images when they cannot be displayed e.g. where a poor internet connection affects how the book is downloaded.
- Alt text also helps search engines understand and index your images, making your research more discoverable.
We expect all images in manuscripts to have sufficient alt text. Authors submitting content will be presented an opportunity to create and review AI generated alt text.
This alt text does not necessarily describe the visual characteristics of the image itself but must convey the same meaning as the image.
The AI generated alt text is provided for convenience. It may misinterpret complex equations and composite images, add information you did not intend, or reverse intended meanings, among other errors.
Springer Nature does not warrant the accuracy, completeness, or suitability of autogenerated alt text. Authors remain solely responsible for the accuracy of all alt text associated with their manuscripts.
Springer Nature does not make post-publication corrections to alt text, so to ensure the accurate presentation of your work, you must review its suggestions carefully.
Research figures
The clear presentation of data is imperative for the understanding of research. To ensure data are as easy to interpret as possible, we ask you to include (and avoid) certain features.
We also ask authors to consider accessibility across main and extended data figures.
The research figure guide for Nature explains which design patterns, text, and colours are best able to support legibility and usability for all readers. This guidance can be applied to all journal submissions to Springer Nature.
Supplementary files
Audio-only or video files that contain audio information, but no spoken content must have a descriptive summary to act as an explanatory caption.
We expect all supplementary files that are primarily intended to be human-readable to be accessible. Files other than audio or video files that are not primarily intended to be human-readable (for example, graphics file formats, HTML or SBML documents) are exempt from this requirement. The human readable documents that you must make accessible are as follows.
Portable Document Format files (.pdf)
These must be “tagged” for accessibility, as described by Adobe in Creating Accessible Documents In Adobe Acrobat and by Microsoft in Create accessible PDFs.
Office documents (e.g. word processing, spreadsheets)
The vendors of these products provide simple tools for improving the accessibility of these documents:
- Microsoft Excel spreadsheets (.xls, .xlsx)
- Microsoft Word documents (.doc, .docx)
- Microsoft Powerpoint documents (.ppt, .pptx)
Similar documents (PDF, presentation, word processing, and spreadsheet files) by other vendors than Microsoft are also expected to be accessible, and vendors will likely have their own guides such as LibreOffice’s How to Create Accessible LibreOffice Files.
Images inside human-readable documents must also meet the requirements for images described above.
Note: accessibility guidance or tools from external vendors is provided for convenience. Springer Nature does not control and is not responsible for the content of external documentation or services.
