The Office for Students is committed to making its website accessible, in accordance with the Public Sector Bodies (Websites 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
- Three pages hosted by a third party service which we use to subscribe users to our different mailing lists have several accessibility issues, including not supporting zooming and scaling text and not specifying a language element. This fails WCAG 2.1 1.4.4 Resize Text and WCAG 2.1 3.1.1 Language of Page. We are investigating a solution to this problem and aim to correct it by the end of December 2021.
- The keyboard focus across the site currently uses our corporate yellow, which means that it is not clearly visible where we use a link or button with a corporate yellow background. This fails WCAG 2.1 2.4.7 Focus Visible. We will resolve this problem by the end of December 2021.
- Around 130 PDFs published since September 2020 have small accessibility issues. For example, the heading structure may be inconsistent or a logo may be missing alternative text. We are correcting these PDFs and aim to make them compliant by the end of January 2022.
Disproportionate burden
Many of the PDFs available on the website published before September 2020 are not fully accessible. They may, for example, have missing alternative text or bookmarks.
The digital publishing team at the Office for Students is small and works routinely with a heavy publishing workload. Given the volume of files in question, we judge that the burden of updating all these PDFs would undermine the team's ability to carry out the essential business of the organisation.
Likewise, most of the spreadsheets available on the website published before October 2021 are not fully accessible.
Given the volume of files in question, we judge that the burden of updating all these spreadsheets would undermine the organisations ability to carry out essential business.
We will however aim to produce an accessible version of any file at an individual's request. To request an accessible version, email the digital publishing team or call 0117 931 7317.
