This website is run by the University of Lincoln. We want everyone using our website to have as good an experience as possible.

We have therefore applied the following accessibility standards to ensure that all users —either directly from their browser or using a plugin or assistive technology — can navigate the site and access its content.

User controls

Viewing

You can change the colours and contrast levels using the default controls within your browser.

You can also change the font and magnify the page to a maximum of 500% without text or links spilling off the screen.

Navigating

The web page can be navigated using keyboard controls. The current link is also highlighted by a change in border colour. Use your keyboard to skip links.

Users of screen readers can also get a list of all links on a page and understand their purpose from the link text.

Listening

Use text to speech browser plugins or screen reader assistive technologies to listen to any content selected using the mouse or keyboard.

Screen readers can also help you to listen to the site content and navigate around it using menu items.

Devices

Advice on using different devices on websites is available on the My Way website.

How accessible is this website?

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) define requirements for designers and developers to improve accessibility for people with disabilities. The guidelines define three levels of conformance: Level A, Level AA, and Level AAA.

This website is partially compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1 AA standard, due to the non-compliances listed below. Partially conformant means that some parts of the content do not fully conform to the accessibility standard.

We know that certain aspects of this website may prevent it from being fully accessible:

Content uploaded by the site owner

This site is based on a WordPress theme created by the central WordPress team at the University of Lincoln and we have endeavoured to make this as accessible as possible. However, content such as PDFs, video and/or imagery will have been uploaded by the site owner. Videos are likely to be hosted on external platforms and we are therefore dependent on the accessibility features within the embedding tools provided by these platforms for this kind of content. We also cannot guarantee that the video content has accurate subtitles. Similarly, imagery may not be accompanied by suitable and meaningful alternative text and PDFs may not have been exported as accessible documents.

We are working to ensure that all members of staff with responsibility for creating and managing websites within the University of Lincoln domain (Lincoln.ac.uk) are given additional training to raise awareness of web accessibility. This will include specific advice on making PDFs, imagery and video content more accessible and this should, over time, ensure that problematic content is replaced and/or more accurate alternative text and subtitles are provided.

In the meantime, please do notify us via dt@lincoln.ac.uk if you experience any issues accessing content on this site.

Alerts flagged in our testing

1. Suspicious link text – Link text contains extraneous text or may not make sense out of context. Terms like “Read more” or “More information” have been used on buttons or links through to other pages within the site and these have been flagged as potential issues by our accessibility checker. To mitigate any potential issues where this terminology has been used, we have added an aria-label to describe the link meaning, e.g. “Click to read more about this post”.
2. Redundant links – Certain pages within this site contain duplicate links to the same page. This has been done to give users viewing the site easier access to these pages. Where appropriate, an aria-label has been added to give a fuller description for these links.
3. Colour contrast: The colour of the text and the colour of the background are not in sufficient contrast to each other. The use of white text and a coloured background on social media share buttons on this site results in an accessibility contrast problem, specifically the Facebook and Twitter share buttons at the base of single pages. To fix this would result in change the branding colour of the logos which would be confusing for the user and would contravene the branding guidelines of the associated companies.

What to do if you have a problem

We’re always looking to improve the accessibility of this website. If you encounter specific accessibility problems or issues with any of the content published on this site, please contact us via dt@lincoln.ac.uk to let us know and we will do everything we can to rectify them.

If you have any other feedback on the accessibility of this site please contact us via the following methods:

Phone: 01522886500
E-mail: dt@lincoln.ac.uk
Postal address: Digital Services, 1st Floor North West, Minerva Building, University of Lincoln, Brayford Pool, Lincoln, LN6 7TS

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).

Technical information about this website’s accessibility

The University of Lincoln is committed to making its websites accessible, in accordance with the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018.

We aim to respond to feedback within 5 working days.

How we tested the site

This site was last tested in September 2019 by staff at the University of Lincoln using the Wave Web Accessibility tool and the AChecker tool, with the additional use of Chrome browser extensions Axe and SiteImprove.