We want everyone who visits the Newcastle University Blogging Service website to feel welcome and find the experience rewarding, going above and beyond the The Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations 2018.
What are we doing?
To help us make the Newcastle University Blogging Service website a positive place for everyone, we’ve been using the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1. These guidelines explain how to make web content more accessible for people with disabilities, and user friendly for everyone.
The guidelines have three levels of accessibility (A, AA and AAA). We’ve chosen Level AA as the target for the Newcastle University Blogging Service website.
How are we doing it?
We’re working hard to achieve our goal of Level AA accessibility, but we realise there are some areas that still need improving. To this end we review the service quarterly and the following information explains what we’re doing to make that happen.
1.1.1: Non-text Content
We will be encouraging our users to ensure that any media content they add is accompanied by alternative text.
1.3.1: Info and Relationships
Where possible we will replace instances of HTML content formatting tags with their CSS equivalents.
1.4.1: Use of Color
Where we have templates with insufficient visual cues for hyperlinks, we will add either bold or underline link styles.
1.4.3: Contrast (Minimum)
We’re going to increase the contrast ratio between foreground and background elements within the Zerif Lite template.
2.4.4: Link Purpose (In Context)
We will be encouraging our users to ensure that link titles are consistently labelled and clearly describe their target location.
3.3.2: Labels or Instructions
We will add WAI-ARIA label or role attributes where they are missing from input fields.
4.1.1: Parsing
We will review and fix page validation errors across our templates. In particular, duplicate HTML element IDs.
Let us know what you think
If you enjoyed using the Newcastle University Blogging Service website, or if you had trouble with any part of it, please get in touch. We’d like to hear from you in any of the following ways:
- email us at it.servicedesk@newcastle.ac.uk
- call us on 0191 208 5999