What we’re doing to make our website more accessible
The University is committed to providing accessible digital content, and has initiated a two-year project to resolve outstanding accessibility issues with our websites and to provide training to staff to ensure we meet the highest standards going forward.
Digital Accessibility Project
An accessibility audit was conducted on our website by Jim Byrne Accessible Web Design in July 2019. This consisted of a manual audit using a browser and various assistive technologies on a sample set of pages that were broadly representative of the website as a whole. This included the website homepage, interactive functionality and search pages, and legacy page designs. The results of this audit were used to put forward a business case to run a full-scale project with dedicated staff to improve accessibility.
The project has ten dedicated members of staff, including developers, content creators, a tester and a trainer.
As part of the project, we are migrating content from the legacy website templates so that the website is consistent and accessible. As the migration is happening in sections, this means that some of the issues identified above will exist until the last of the legacy sections is migrated, but we are making good progress in reducing instances of these issues.
As well as migrating content, we are also fixing technical issues with the new templates and addressing content issues. These actions are reducing the instances of issues identified above.
We have a dedicated tester as part of the project who is manually testing migrated content, identifying issues that cannot be automatically detected. These are resolved by developers, improving accessibility on an ongoing basis.