October 2025 POP Updates
Caroline Mort
October 2025 Updates
Hi all, and happy fall! This month’s theme is all about accessibility. Let’s dive in.
General Updates
As many of you may be aware, the ADA Title II compliance deadline is quickly approaching. All content published on or after April 24, 2026 on UNC Press’s Janeway and Meru platforms should be in compliance with ADA Title II. This means that journal articles in PDF format should be tagged and include alt text for all figures, tables, and images. Decorative images, such as a border, are not required to have alt text. Alt text will also be required for any cover images harvested into Meru. Meru’s admin backend allows you to add alt text for all cover (thumbnail) and header images.
The easiest way to make sure that your articles are compliant is to create “born accessible” PDFs by incorporating accessibility checks and alt text creation into your production workflows. Applications like Microsoft Word and Adobe Acrobat are capable of creating a tagged PDF with alt text. Both applications also allow you to perform accessibility checks to ensure that your document is accessible and allow you to remediate them if they are not fully compliant.
We are monitoring what these regulations will mean for journal content published before April 24, 2026, on our Janeway and Meru platforms. It is possible that remediation could be required for the existing articles. It is also possible that some content will fall under an exception and not require remediation, at least not immediately. Regardless, we recommend that you integrate accessibility into your journal workflows as soon as possible.
We’re excited to be a part of making journal content accessible to all. We would love to hear about any insights or questions that you might have, or what your library is doing to make your web content accessible. We've shared a few resources below on how to create accessible journal articles in whatever format they might be, how to check your existing journal articles for accessibility, and alt text best practices.
Janeway Updates
Janeway 1.9 will be released sometime later this fall with a focus on accessibility. The goal of this update is to have Janeway’s “Clean Theme” in compliance with WCAG 2.2 and an updated VPAT. We recommend that you use the Clean Theme for maximum accessibility.
Meru Updates
Meru’s permalink feature is now live and available in the admin portal. The permalink feature allows you to create a clean and customized permalink that you can share with users to direct them to a specific community, journal, volume, issue, or article.
An example permalink would look like this: https://uncp.pop.meru.host/permalink/yourjournal.
If you have any questions or would like a demo of this feature, please get in touch with Caroline (cm...@unc.edu).