Accessibility

Using the website

We want as many people as possible to be able to use our website and we are continually working towards improving its accessibility. We follow general principles of usability and universal design and endeavour to meet level 2 (AA) of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1.

In this accessibility statement, we refer to browser plug-ins and other tools that may make your experience of web content more comfortable or productive. These suggestions are provided in good faith from reputable sources but please note that plugins and software are used at your own risk. We are not responsible for any issues arising from the use of tools or plugins over which they have no influence or control. Plugin suggestions are for the Chrome browser but similar (or identical) plugins exist for other browsers. 

Our website will allow you to:

  • zoom in up to 200% without the text spilling off the screen
  • on a laptop/PC browser, you can magnify text either by
    • increasing the default font size in your browser settings, and/or
    • increasing the default font size with a browser plugin (for example A+ Font Size Changer Lite) and/or
    • using the inbuilt browser zoom function (CTRL + (Windows) or CMD + (Mac))
  • navigate most of the website using tab, shift-tab, enter and arrow keys or speech recognition tools
  • listen to most of the website using a text to speech tool
  • skip to main content using the tab on your keyboard on most of our pages
  • pages have been designed so that users should be able to change font size and colours within the browser or using browser plug-ins like HighContrast
  • most pages are structured with heading levels allowing screen reader users to instantly skip to the section they need. Dyslexic and other users can also benefit using browser plugins like headingsMap 

We’ve also made the website text as simple as possible to understand.

How accessible this website is

Though we are committed to making our website accessible, we know some parts of this website are not fully accessible yet. For example:

Images and multimedia

  • Some multimedia and auto-scrolling content across the site cannot be paused or hidden
  • Some images may not have appropriate descriptions
  • Some videos may not have captions or audio descriptions

Navigation and keyboard

  • Skip links are not always available for repeated content like menus.
  • The tab order on some pages does not always support the visual layout

Page view and personalisation

  • The use of some colours on our website may cause contrast issues
  • Many PDFs are not yet fully accessible to screen reader software or users requiring high magnification with reflow. We recommend readers to open the PDFs in Microsoft Word. The Web layout view in Word is likely to give a better reflow and magnification experience up to 500%. Immersive Reader in Word also gives a range of reading options.

Please see our technical information section below to find out more about the known accessibility issues on our website, and what we are doing to resolve these.

Making changes to your device

There are several customisation options for your browser and device that could help you use this website and other websites more effectively.

AbilityNet provides advice on making your device easier to use if you have a disability.

Technical information about this website’s accessibility 

We are committed to making our website accessible, in accordance with the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018.

This website is partially compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1 – AA standard, due to the instances of non-compliance and exceptions listed below.

Non-accessible content 

The content listed below is non-accessible for the following reasons.

Non-compliance with the accessibility regulations

Images and multimedia

We recognise there are some issues with our images and multimedia and aim to have resolved these by November 2020, except when the audio or video is a media alternative for text and is clearly labelled as such:

  • Some images do not have a text alternative, so people using a screen reader cannot access the information (WCAG: 1.1.1)

Forms and activities

We are working to address these issues during 2020:

  • We don’t always provide sufficient labels or instructions to help you interact with our website (WCAG: 3.3.2)
  • Not all of our page functionality is available just through using a keyboard interface

Navigation and keyboard

The majority of the below will be resolved by October 2020, however, we estimate the full piece of work will be resolved during 2020. We will provide updates on our progress, on this webpage:

  • Some headings, regions, lists, and tables are not coded appropriately (WCAG: 1.3.1)
  • Some elements visually styled as headings are not coded as such (WCAG: 1.3.1)
  • Tabbed content doesn’t always have an appropriate role (WCAG: 1.3.1)
  • It isn’t always possible to skip elements that are repeated across all our web pages (WCAG: 2.4.1)
  • Our pages don’t always have descriptive and informative titles (WCAG: 2.4.2)
  • The navigation order of links, form elements and similar parts of our webpages isn’t always logical and intuitive (WCAG: 2.4.3)
  • It isn’t always clear which element of the page has the current keyboard focus (WCAG: 2.4.7). While we are working on this you may find a plugin like Focus Indicator helpful to use. 

Page view and personalisation

The majority of the below will be resolved by October 2020, however, we estimate the full piece of work will be resolved during 2020. We will provide updates on our progress, on this webpage:

  • Our text and image contrast ratio is not always high enough (WCAG: 1.4.3)
  • Sometimes you lose content when you reduce the screen size (WCAG: 1.4.10)
  • We don’t have a consistent contrast ratio of 3:1 for elements like buttons, images and links (WCAG: 1.4.11)
  • Sometimes you lose content and functionality when line spacing, paragraph spacing, font size and letter spacing are increased (WCAG: 1.4.12)
  • Sometimes resizing visually rendered text up to 200% causes the text, image or controls to be clipped, truncated or obscured (WCAG: 1.4.4)
  • Some of our automatically moving content can’t be paused or stopped (WCAG: 2.2.2)

Content that’s not within the scope of the accessibility regulations

PDFs and other documents

Some non-essential PDF documents that were published before 23 September 2018 may not be fully accessible. All subsequent PDF documents will comply with accessibility regulations. 

Maps

Our website has online maps which are unlikely to be fully accessible because of the assistive technologies used in their development. An alternative format is provided in most circumstances. For example, links to PDF files, such as our campus map where this is intended for navigational use.

Third party-content

Our site uses third-party content which may not be fully accessible. This includes content we publish on social media channels such as Twitter or YouTube. We are responsible for ensuring the accessibility of the content we produce, however, we have no control over the accessibility of these platforms.

For further details on our third-party systems and their content, please see the third party providers page

Multimedia published pre-Sept 23/2020

Not all of our audio or videos items have captions or transcriptions, and some videos without audio should ideally have audio descriptions. We are working to develop transcripts or alternative versions of all our videos and audios published on or after September 2020. 

Livestream

Live-streamed video does not always have captions, depending on presenter tools and confidence. This is exempt from the regulations. Recorded videos have automated speech recognition and transcripts

Disproportionate burden

This section covers issues that we cannot fix right now. We’ve assessed the cost of fixing these issues but believe that doing so would be a disproportionate burden within the meaning of the law.

360° virtual tours

Our 360° virtual tours are not keyboard accessible nor are they accessible to blind users. The latter would be extremely difficult to achieve technically – but the former should be possible, and we are actively exploring more accessible interfaces. In the meantime, we believe that the benefits of this partially accessible content for disabled people with mobility issues or anxiety issues outweigh the disadvantages and we offer 1:1 orientation training to blind students as part of our normal support. Consequently, we are claiming virtual tours as a disproportionate burden for this year. 

Third parties

There would be a disproportionate burden to do an accessibility audit for our third-party suppliers. We are, however, contacting these providers and asking them to publish accessibility statements with a view to continuing our work with them.

For third parties where accessibility statements are already available, please see the third party providers page