Website Accessibility
Website accessibility statement for Middlesex University London
This accessibility statement applies to the Middlesex University London website.
This website is run by Middlesex University London. We want everyone who visits our website to feel welcome and for as many people as possible to be able to use this website. On this website you should be able to:
- Zoom in to 400% without causing two-directional scrolling
- Use most of the website with just a keyboard
- Use most of the website with speech recognition software
- Use most of the website with a screen reader
We’ve also made the website text as simple as possible to understand, using plain English and clear language.
AbilityNet has advice on making your device easier to use if you have a disability.
How accessible this website is
We know some parts of this website are not fully accessible:
- Most of our older PDF documents are not fully accessible to screen reader software
- Some of our images do not have text alternatives
- Some of our videos may not be correctly captioned and subtitled
- The way some of our pages are created may make it harder for them to be read by screen reader software
- Some of our links rely on colour to identify them, and some image links and buttons may not have been given text alternatives
- Some of our pages, particularly our course pages, may be hard to navigate using a keyboard
- Some of the colours on our website may not have sufficient contrast which may make it harder to read text on our website
- When our pages are resized, the text on them may sometimes be clipped, making it hard to read it
Feedback and contact information
What to do if you cannot access parts of this website
If you need information on this website in a different format like accessible PDF, large print, easy read, audio recording or braille, please:
- Email [email protected]
- Call +44 (0)20 8411 5555
We’ll consider your request and get back to you in 28 days.
Reporting accessibility problems with this website
We’re always looking to improve the accessibility of this website. If you find any problems that aren’t listed on this page or think we’re not meeting the requirements of the accessibility regulations, please email our web team [email protected].
What to do if you’re not happy with how we’ve dealt with your problem
If you have contacted us about an accessibility problem, but you feel that this has not been dealt with satisfactorily, we want to know.
The first stage would be to raise your concern informally. The aim of this stage is to achieve a quick and easy solution for you. It would be appropriate to take the concern through the relevant contact listed above for reporting an accessibility problem.
If, after this, we have not dealt with your concern satisfactorily, you can take it through to a formal complaint. Our policies page has more information on making a complaint.
Enforcement procedure
The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) is responsible for enforcing the Public Sector Bodies (Website and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018 (the ‘accessibility regulations’). If you are not happy with how we respond to your complaint, contact the Equality Advisory and Support Service (EASS).
Technical information about this website’s accessibility
Middlesex University London is committed to making its website accessible, in accordance with the Public Sector Bodies (Website and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018.
Compliance status
This website is partially compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1 AA standard, due to the non-compliances and exemptions listed below.
Non-accessible content
The content listed below is non-accessible for the following reasons.
Non-compliance with the accessibility regulations
Images
Some of our images may not have text alternatives. We are reviewing this across the website, fixing issues, making this a required field in our web content management system and training content creators to write meaningful and useful alternative text for images. We plan to fix this by the end of 2023 and when we publish new images we will make sure it meets accessibility standards.
Videos and embedded content
WCAG 1.2.2. Captions (Prerecorded), 1.2.3. Audio Description or Media Alternative (Prerecorded), and 1.2.5. Audio Description (Prerecorded)
Some of our video content may not be correctly captioned and subtitled. We are reviewing all our video content to address this.
Where videos are old, in order to not break the YouTube URL or the ID of the video, some videos may have transcripts instead of captions.
Navigation and links
WCAG 1.3.1. Info and Relationships
We are working with our content management system providers to ensure our templates are built correctly. This includes use of proper headings and nesting, WAI-ARIA labelling, and working functionality.
Some of our links rely on colour to identify them. We are reviewing how we can add other visual cues like bigger fonts, iconography, underlines etc.
WCAG 2.4.4. Link Purpose (In Context), 2.4.9. Link Purpose (Link Only), 4.1.2. Name, Role, Value
Some of our pages have links without a text alternative. We are reviewing this across our site and training our content creators to use meaningful, unique link text.
Text and content
Not all our page element IDs are unique. This can make it harder for assistive technology users to understand the layout of a page. We are currently reviewing this issue to assess the amount of work it will take to fix it across our website.
WCAG 1.4.3. Contrast (minimum)
Some of the colours on our website may not have sufficient contrast and are not AA compliant. This can make it harder to read our text.
We now have better supporting colours on top of the primary ones and are reviewing this across the site, making sure our contrast rate is AA compliant, all text is readable and updating our style sheets to prevent this happening again.
Some of our text is clipped when the page is resized. We are ensuring all fonts are scalable and reviewing whether we can stop our content creators updating our website with text that is too long to stop this happening.
Most pages do have the option to skip to the page's main, unique content. There are three places where this is still happening, and we are working through these to make sure this function is available.
WCAG 2.4.7. Focus Visible and 2.1.1. Keyboard
On some of our course pages users cannot use their keyboard to tab through carousel controls. We are currently working with our website development agency to fix this issue so these pages can be navigated only using a keyboard and to set unique IDs to each tab.
Some of our pages may not have titles. This makes it harder for assistive technology users to understand. We are reviewing these pages across the site and ensuring titles are in place.
Some of our pages have not had their language defined. We are reviewing this with our website developers to ensure this is added to the HTML code of our web pages.
Some of our inline frames (iFrames) do not have a text alternative. We are reviewing this across our website and manually fixing these issues.
Some of our buttons do not have a text alternative. We are reviewing all buttons where we know this is an issue to add alternative text. In future, we will ensure that everyone adds alternative text when they are creating new buttons.
Forms
Form fields are not always labelled on our website forms. We are reviewing this across the website and resolving these issues.
Disproportionate burden
We have identified some areas of our website which do not meet our accessibility standards, but would be a disproportionate burden for us to fix.
Our ‘Ask a question’ chat widget has no visible keyboard tab focus for the close button. This widget is built by a third-party software developer and we are discussing with them their timelines for addressing this issue.
Content that’s not within the scope of the accessibility regulations
PDFs and other documents
Our site contains a number of PDFs and other documents created in previous years that do not meet accessibility standards.
The accessibility regulations do not require us to fix PDFs or other documents published before 23 September 2018 if they are not essential to providing our services.
Any new PDFs or Word documents we publish will meet accessibility standards.
Third party content
We may sometimes have third party content or functionality on our website. Where we are legally required to feature third party content, we cannot reasonably accept responsibility for ensuring it meets accessibility standards. However, for all content we have control over or have otherwise chosen to include, including that which we have paid for, we are obliged to work towards ensuring this content is accessible as possible. We are embedding accessibility into our procurement processes, meaning it is a necessary part of any contract for digital work.
Third party platforms
We often use other applications to create official Middlesex University content. For example:
- Social media content, such as on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn;
- Videos which we post on YouTube, Vimeo or Kaltura.
We must make sure our own content is as accessible as possible (for example, by making sure any video we upload to YouTube has appropriate subtitled, captions and audio description). However, we do not have influence over the accessibility of the platform itself (for example, the YouTube video player functionality).
Third party statements
We have requested accessibility statements from our suppliers which outline their product's accessibility, and their future plans to improve in this area. We will list all received statements on our webpage for third party supplier accessibility statements.
Plans for improvement
Our University Accessibility Working Group has oversight of our ongoing accessibility improvements.
We are going to be launching a new website in 2023 and we are working with our software developers to make sure our new website meets at least AA Accessibility guidelines.
We are putting together an accessibility checklist for our website editors to use before publishing pages on our new website.
We are working with staff and students with a range of disabilities, including users of assistive technology, to provide feedback and help us test our new website, making sure we fix issues with the new website.
How we tested this site
We use SiteImprove which is an automated tool which scans our website for accessibility issues include: Accessibility best practices, WAI-ARIA authoring practices, WCAG A and AA conformance.
We also conduct frequent manual testing to pick up errors that an automated scan cannot identify. To do this we use a range of tools including: Lighthouse, Wave.com and HeadingsMap (chrome extension).
About this statement
This statement was created on 23 January 2020.