Accessibility Policy -

About Vox > Accessibility Policy

Created 2026/05/22

Accessibility Statement

Vox Clamantis Books is committed to ensuring equal access and participation for disabled people. We are committed to treating disabled people in a way that allows them to maintain their dignity and independence.

We believe in integration, and we are committed to meeting the needs of disabled people in a timely manner. We will do so by removing and preventing barriers to accessibility and by meeting our accessibility requirements under Ontario’s accessibility laws.

Our website accessibility information

Principles

We follow the social model of disability

The social model of disability suggests that if all the barriers to access were removed, disabled people could be full participants in society. This model was developed by disability rights activists in the 1970s and 80s.

“If everyone was taught sign language at an early age, a deaf person would no longer be disadvantaged. If towns were built and planned with physical disabilities in mind and there was no social stigma attached to looking or sounding different, then having a physical impairment would no longer be disabling.”

~ Nancy Doyle (2020), We Have Been Disabled: How The Pandemic Has Proven The Social Model Of Disability

The social model of disability prefers the term “disabled people” because people are disabled by barriers to inclusion. Contrast this with “person with a disability” (also known as “person-first” terminology). Saying “person with a disability” tends to resemble the medical model of disability, which regards the condition as inherently disabling, in need of medical intervention, and something that can be fixed by modifying the person instead of making the environment more accessible.

Identity-first versus person-first terminology

Person-first terminology is often based on the assumption that being disabled is a negative characteristic. Many deaf, blind, and autistic people see their condition as an inherent part of who they are, either neutral or positive, and therefore prefer identity-first language.

Person-first terminology may sometimes be more appropriate when talking about a specific condition (e.g., a person with dyslexia, a person with chronic fatigue), unless the community regards the condition as an inherent part of who they are, and not a negative attribute. But we will always be guided by how people describe themselves.

Person-First Language: What It Is, and When Not To Use It

Nothing about us without us

This is a general principle adopted by the disability rights movement in the 1990s, which emphasizes that any decision or discussion which affects disabled people should involve them from the outset, not as an afterthought.

In 2004, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan stated that “no society can claim to be based on justice and equality without persons with disabilities taking decisions as full-fledged members”.

Our Accessibility Policy

We use people’s preferred terminology for their disability. We avoid stigmatizing language.
Nothing about us without us. We commit to involving disabled people in any decisions involving or affecting their wellbeing.
Creating accessible content and software. All our websites, software, training materials, and other communications (invoices, quotes, statements, videos) will be provided in accessible formats, in a manner that takes into account the needs of the audience.
Providing alternatives and accessible environments. If we organize events, we will strive to provide perfume-free, wheelchair-accessible, inclusive environments, food options, and whatever else is needed to create a safe, welcoming, stress-free environment.
Everything we do should uphold the principles of dignity, independence, integration and equal opportunity for disabled people.

Our website accessibility

We have added the OneTap accessibility toolbar at the bottom right of every page, so you can change the appearance of the page to match your requirements.
Where we include video, we add closed captioning. [How to turn on closed captions.]
Where we use animation, we provide the ability to turn it off (go to accessibility settings on your computer and select “reduced motion”).
We have used some transparency effects but also tested them for contrast. If you have issues with transparency effects, you can change your settings to automatically turn them off.
All our pages use headings and semantic markup for ease of navigating the content.
There is a “skip to content” link on every page for screen readers.
All our images have alt text describing what is in the image.
On the rare occasions where we have used tables, we arrange the data so as to be readable from left to right, and add a table summary.

Accessibility Policy