Accessibility statement

This website is run by the web team within the Directorate of Marketing and Communications. We want as many people as possible to be able to use our website, and have designed it to be accessible.

Using this website

You should be able to:

• change colours, contrast levels and fonts
• zoom in up to 200% with text being visible on the screen and most images will scale without loss of resolution
• navigate this website with a keyboard and speech recognition software
• read most of the website using a screen reader or devices without a screen, like a braille computer
• skip links to the main content of a page with a keyboard
• use the website when Javascript is turned off

We have made the website text as simple as possible to understand and aim for a reading age of a 12 year old.

We use some technical or university terms where there is no easier wording we can use without changing what the text means.

How accessible this website is

The majority of this website is fully accessible and we run continuous testing to identify any issues. We work to achieve and maintain WCAG 2.1 AA standards, but it is not always possible for all our content to be accessible.

We know that some areas will need work to be fully accessible:

• we have a large number of documents, including documents in PDF format that are essential to providing our services haven’t been designed to be accessible
• some content is embedded in our website, such as maps and videos, and you cannot easily scale these on screen (but you can open a full screen version)

Reporting accessibility problems

If you have any problems accessing content which isn't listed on this page or think that we're not meeting the requirements of the accessibility regulations then please email webdev@brookes.ac.uk to let us know. We will consider your request and get back to you within 10 working days.

Enforcement procedure

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) is responsible for enforcing the accessibility regulations. If you’re not happy with how we respond to your complaint, contact the Equality Advisory and Support Service (EASS).

Technical information about this website's accessibility

Oxford Brookes University are committed to making our websites and mobile applications accessible, in accordance with The Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) Accessibility Regulations 2018 No.952.

This website is partially compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 (WCAG) to AA standard, due to the non-compliances listed below.

Content issues

We are aware of the following issues on our site:

PDFs and other documents

PDFs are not able to comply with the requirements of the web accessibility standard, and we do not generally upload new PDFs. Where we do create new PDFs, we will use the PDF/A standard which is more accessible.

Our site contains a large number of PDFs created in previous years. Where these are no longer being updated, we do not intend to recreate them in accessible versions as this would be a disproportionate burden. The accessibility regulations don’t require us to fix PDFs or other documents published before 23 September 2018 if they’re not essential to providing our services. This doesn't meet WCAG 2.1 success criterion 4.1.2 (name, role value).

By September 2020 we intend to have completed the process of converting PDFs and Word documents still in active use into accessible web formats.

We do not generally add new PDFs to our site. There are some exceptions:

• We add some PDFs as downloads of reports or publications, but where a web page version is also available.

We also have a number of forms in Microsoft Word format, which are not accessible. We will either replace these with accessible HTML forms, or remove them, by September 2020.

Video, audio and images

• Not all images have appropriate alternative text.
• Some images may contain pictures of text.
• There is no mechanism to pause or stop scrolling content.
• Most audio content may have no transcripts available.
• Videos from our YouTube channels use automated closed captioning and transcriptions, and this is often inaccurate.

Text and content

• Some tables do not have the correct markup for headers.
• Some pages don’t have a top level heading, have empty headings or heading order is not correct.
• Not all of our content reaches our target reading age of 12. years old. We are currently updating content and this will be updated by September 2021.
• Some pages contain maps that provide location information that is not searchable by sight impaired or keyboard only users. We have added directions next to these but if you require assistance please contact us.

Links

• Not all link text makes sense when read on its own (for example 'click here').
• Some pages have multiple links with the same link text but different destinations on one page.

Forms

Some pages have form fields with no labels.

Colour contrast

Some pages have colour contrast issues.

What we are doing to improve

We intend to resolve these issues by September 2020.

How we test this website

This website undergoes continuous testing against the W3C WAI Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1 using the automated Siteimprove tool. This tool scans 100% of our web pages, and tests against all the criteria in the guidelines which are possible to automate.

We also conduct manual testing against known accessibility issues which are not able to be found through automated testing.

The university website consists of many related sub-sites: such as our student record system and our helpdesk application. Accessibility statements for such sub-sites will be found locally for each of these.

Preparation of this accessibility statement

This statement was prepared on 19/08/2019 by the EU Directive on Accessibility for websites and applications Working Group (EDAWG) and then formally endorsed by the Quality and Learning Infrastructure Committee (QLIC).

Last update

This statement was last updated on 19 August 2019. We update this statement annually and will next review it in August 2020.