Accessibility statement

This accessibility statement applies to the Department for Continuing Education website.

The Department for Continuing Education at the University of Oxford is committed to providing an accessible web presence that gives members of the public full access to the department's information, courses and activities offered publicly through the web. Our Equality Policy outlines our commitment to a culture which ‘maintains a working, learning and social environment in which the rights and dignity of all its staff and students are respected’.

Our aims

In order to ensure that all of our visitors can use our website, these pages aim to meet Level-AA standard of WCAG 2.1. This includes elements such as:

  • Alternative text for all images and providing non-visual alternatives where appropriate
  • All essential audio-visual information is captioned, described as necessary or provided in alternative formats
  • Content can be navigated with just a keyboard or speech recognition tools
  • The website can be used with a screen reader
  • Content is structured, ordered and labelled appropriately

Guidance is available for editors and moderators of this site to help them maintain accessibility standards.

Making changes to your device or system

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

AbilityNet has advice on making your devices easier to use if you have a disability. In addition, major operating systems produce the following guidance:

How accessible this website is

We are aware that some parts of our website are not fully accessible. These include:

  • Most older PDF documents aren’t fully accessible to screen reader software
  • Some form inputs don’t magnify or zoom appropriately
  • Many of the audio on videos aren’t captioned; some multimedia content doesn’t yet have audio or text description
  • Some of our online forms are difficult to navigate using just a keyboard
  • You cannot modify the line height or spacing of text

We are working to address areas where our accessibility needs improvement. Please see 'Technical information' below for more known issues and further details.

Feedback and contact information

The Accessible Resources Acquisition and Creation Unit (ARACU), who are part of the Bodleian Libraries, offer alternative formats for pages on this website for students referred by the Disability Advisory Services. They produce materials in electronic text (RTF document fully structured and with XML tags for navigation) and DAISY 2.02 human voice audio. Both products can be sent out physically (DVD) or via file transfer. They can also produce Braille documents. Please contact aracu@bodleian.ox.ac.uk to discuss your requirements. 

You can also use the free Sensus Access tool on the Bodleian website to convert certain types of files into a more accessible format. 

If you have any further questions about content or wish to discuss provision of an alternative format, please contact the webmaster at webmaster@conted.ox.ac.uk.

Reporting accessibility problems with this website

If you have any questions or concerns about this statement or the accessibility of any of our webpages, please contact the webmaster at webmaster@conted.ox.ac.uk. 

Enforcement procedure

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) is responsible for enforcing the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018 (the ‘accessibility regulations’). If you’re not happy with how we respond to your complaint, contact the Equality Advisory and Support Service (EASS).

Other accessibility resources

If you’d like more information about accessibility and resources for students, staff and visitors in Oxford more generally, please visit our Equality and Diversity pages. 

If you’re looking for information on building accessibility, please try the Access Guide or the University’s interactive map.

Technical information about this website’s accessibility

Department for Continuing Education University of Oxford is committed to making its website accessible, in accordance with the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications)(No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018. As part of this commitment, we are required to publish known issues with our website.

Compliance status

The 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-compliance with the accessibility regulations

There is inconsistency on our sites around the use of ARIA tags and HTML5 labels to help accessibility tools navigate our pages, including some non-distinguishable landmarks (WCAG 2.1 1.3.1)

We have improved this on our website and are working on further changes and improvements.

Some aria tags need to be reviewed. For example, the link to other runs for course when viewing a course contains broken aria reference and aria menu.

Issues with text, including hyperlinks, descriptions, labels, web pages

Links:

  • Some link text doesn’t make sense when read on its own (for example, ‘click here’) (WCAG 2.1 2.4.4 and 2.4.9)
  • Some link text is used for multiple different destinations (WCAG 2.1 2.4.4)
  • Alternative text for image is identical to link text (WCAG 2.1 1.1.1)
  • Element not highlighted on focus (WCAG 2.1 2.4.7)
  • Empty links (WCAG 2.4.4)
  • Linked image missing alternative text (WCAG 1.1.1 2.4.4)
  • Long alternative text (WCAG 1.1.1)

We continue to work with our website editors to provide them with training and guidance on best practices. We will use manual checks to improve and maintain the quality of link text across the site.

Heading is missing text (WCAG 2.1 1.3.1)

We continue to work with our website editors to provide them with training and guidance on best practices. We use quality assurance tools that helps us to check for these instances along with manual checks to improve and maintain the quality of content across the site.

Headings: Some headings are not nested properly, some of our pages are missing H1 and some have skipped the heading level (WCAG 2.1 2.4.1)

Some of the pages that have skipped heading levels are the homepage, course search page, contact us, find us and profile pages.

We continue to work with our website editors to provide them with training and guidance on best practices. We use quality assurance tools that helps us to check for these instances along with manual checks to improve and maintain the quality of content across the site.

Some tables do not have clearly defined headers (WCAG 2.1 1.3.1)

We’re aware of this issue on some of our course pages. We continue to work with our website editors with guidance on best practices.

HTML is used to format some content on our site (WCAG 2.1 1.3.1)

We continue to work with our website editors to provide them with training and guidance on best practices. We use manual checks to improve and maintain the quality of content across the site.

Link text is not always identified in ways other than colour (WCAG 2.1 1.4.1)

We are working with our developers to consider link style options that will provide greater clarity and will implement changes in the coming months.

There are colour contrast issues with some of the text found across the platform (WCAG 2.1 1.4.3)

We have improved colour contrast issues across the website and are working with our developers to find a fix for a few outstanding occurrences.

Some of the pages which have a colour contrast issue exist for right hand columns used for filtering content (such as the DPhil students’ and individual profile page, news list tags) or within the main content (such as the course sample pages like Brontës course).

iFrame is missing a title (WCAG 2.1 4.1.2)

We’re working with our developers to implement a fix across our sites.

Issues with images, video and audio

Not all video has captions, text or audio description (WCAG 2.1 1.2)

Where video has audio, we try to provide captioning. However, where video is audio free, we may not always provide an alternative. We are working to develop audio or textual alternatives to these instances on our sites and to label them where appropriate.

Not all audio has captions or text description (WCAG 2.1 1.2)

When we use embedded audio on our site, we may not always provide an alternative. We will work to develop transcripts or textual alternatives to these instances on our sites.

Not all images are free of text (WCAG 2.1 1.4.5)

We continue to work with our website editors to provide them with training and guidance on best practices. We use a quality assurance tool that helps us to check these instances along with manual checks to improve and maintain the quality of images across the site.

Issues with documents, including Word files, PowerPoints, PDFs

Many of our older documents don’t meet accessibility standards - for example, they may not be marked up so that they’re accessible to a screen reader (WCAG 2.1 4.1.2)

Any new documents we publish will meet accessibility standards, and we are providing training to website editors to ensure that they are aware of best practice. We are working to replace or find alternatives for documents that aren’t accessible. The accessibility regulations don’t require us to fix documents published before 23 September 2018 if they’re not essential to providing our services.

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

PDFs and other documents

Some of our PDFs and Word documents are essential to providing our services. For example, we have PDFs with information on how users can access our services, and forms published as Word documents. We are in the process of replacing important policy documents with accessible HTML pages

The accessibility regulations do not require us to fix PDFs or other documents published before 23 September 2018 if they’re not essential to providing our services.

Third party content

Our site includes third party content and functionality. This may direct you to a related service, link to another site or supporting documentation. We are not responsible for the accessibility of third-party content or to other sites we link to.

Where we are legally required to feature third party content or functionality, we cannot reasonably accept responsibility for ensuring it meets accessibility standards. However, where it is within our control, we will make every reasonable effort to work towards meeting accessibility requirements.

Third party platforms

We often create content which is hosted on third party platforms. This includes:

  • Content we create for social media
  • Video which we host on YouTube
  • Mapping our study and accommodation locations using Google Maps
  • Data we supply to national databases

We are responsible for ensuring the content we supply meets accessibility requirements; however, we are not responsible for the accessibility of the platform itself.

What we’re doing to improve accessibility

We want our website to offer the best experience possible for all our users. In addition to our plan to fix known issues, we continue to work on website content and structure. We are working with our developers and content creators to fix issues and think about future developments. We are also updating the ways in which we provide training and best practice to those working on our website. 

Preparation of this accessibility statement

This statement was prepared on 14 October 2020. It was last reviewed on 22 October 2020.

This website was last tested on 16 October 2020. The test was carried out by using quality assurance tools across most pages as well as a manual check of a substantial and carefully chosen sample of pages and content types.

We tested the page with the varying content and that are frequently used. This includes:

  • Our homepage
  • Stay in the know page
  • Basket process pages
  • Course pages
  • Profiles list and individual profile pages
  • News pages
  • Search courses page
  • Events page