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The Department of Engineering Science Accessibility Statement, University of Oxford

Accessibility statement

The Department is committed to providing an accessible web presence that gives members of the public and members of the University community full access to information, courses and activities offered publicly through the web.

This statement covers websites that are hosted on the Departments Content Management System (CMS), managed centrally by the IT and Communications teams, but with individual subsites having their own content editors.

This statement covers the following websites:

  • Main Department of Engineering Science website - https://eng.ox.ac.uk
  • Individual research group and academic websites starting with https://eng.ox.ac.uk/[websitename]
  • AIMS CDT website - https://aims.robots.ox.ac.uk 
  • Oxford e-Research Centre website - https://oerc.ox.ac.uk
  • Energy and Power Group website - https://epg.eng.ox.ac.uk

The Department has a wide variety of individual research group, academic and other websites, which fall outside of the scope of this statement and should have their own accessibility statement.

Our aims

In order to ensure that all of our visitors can use our website, these pages aim to meet the the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version (WCAG) 2.1 AA standard.

This includes elements such as:

  • Alt text for all images and providing non-visual alternatives where appropriate
  • All essential audiovisual 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.

How accessible this website is

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

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

  • Some of our images do not have Alt text specified
  • Some of our pages render empty heading tags
  • Some older PDF documents aren’t fully accessible to screen reader software
  • Some of our videos are captioned, other older videos will need to make use of YouTube's built in captioning functionality.
  • None of our videos have a transcript
  • Main content/ most page elements are not accessible through a keyboard
  • Colour contrast of the text (dates) and the colour of the background in the news & events listing are not in sufficient contrast
    to each other
  • On our news listing page, jobs listing page, people profiles, breadcrumbs menu and banners with text overlay the colour contrast of the text / the colour of the background are not in sufficient contrast to each other
  • On our homepage, content in the carousel and the news and events section doesn't scale properly at 200% zoom
  • Links in the main navigation do not have focus visible on keyboard focus
  • The majority of links and buttons in the main content of our pages do not have a focus visible on keyboard focus
  • When using our site search, an error message is not displayed if there are no results relevant to the keyword entered
  • Our whole website needs to better take into account styling to make a useful printable version of the content
  • Our default font size may be on the slightly smaller side due to the font type used and this may make the content difficult to read for the majority of our users
  • Some of our pages do not properly define a main heading (H1), or may have multiple H1 defined, or may skip some heading levels
  • On the majority of our pages The main navigation is the only way for a user to navigate around the site

We are working hard to address areas where our accessibility needs improvement.

Making changes to your device or system

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

Other accessibility resources

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

If you’re looking for information on our building accessibility, please contact the relevant building reception.

How we tested this website

This website was tested over a two week period, 27 July to 7 August 2020. The test was carried out by Deeson, an external digital agency.

Going forward, we will manually test new subsites before we make them live and continue to advise content owners on creating accessible content. 

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

This section covers issues that we do not need to fix right now. The law calls these exemptions.

Portable Document Formats (PDFs) and documents

Some of our PDFs that are not essential to providing our services were published before 23rd September 2018. We are implementing strategies to ensure that any new PDFs or documents we publish will meet accessibility standards. 

If you have trouble accessing these documents, please contact us by email comms@eng.ox.ac.uk or by telephone 01865 273000

Maps

Our website uses online maps. Where there is a map, the information being displayed is provided in an alternative format on the same web page. 

For example, on our contact us page we have a map to show users where our offices are located. If you cannot read the map, we also have our address listed and full contact information if you need help finding us.

Third-party content

Our website contains third-party content. We do not have control over and are not responsible for the accessibility of this content, but we make best endeavours to work with the third-party to improve its accessibility. This may include:

  • Links to non-University of Oxford/ Department of Engineering websites
  • Content/functionality on our website
  • Content hosted on other websites, such as social media sites.

Other sites within our domain

The Department of Engineering Science’s web estate consists of many related sub-sites with the eng.ox.ac.uk domain. Accessibility statements for such sub-sites should be found locally on each site. Please contact the website owner in the first instance with any queries you may have.

If you struggle to find information about a site's accessibility or are unable to make contact with the site owner, please get in touch with us  (details in the next section, below).

Reporting issues with website accessibility, providing feedback and contact information

If you have any other questions or concerns about this statement or the accessibility of any of our webpages, or would like to request information on this website in a different format like accessible PDF, large print, easy read, audio recording or braille, you can contact us by email comms@eng.ox.ac.uk or by telephone 01865 273000.

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).

 

This statement was prepared on 31 July 2020. It was last updated on 23 September 2020. We will be carrying out further reviews of our accessibility statement as we improve our website accessibility.