Following the legislation on the accessibility of public sector websites we test and audit our EdWeb CMS content at regular intervals. We record these issues in our accessibility statement and set a time line to get them fixed.

Honesty is the best policy

It’s much better to be honest and list all the accessibility issues you have on your site in your accessibility statement with a timeline on when you are going to fix them by. The temptation is to hide from them and hope it all goes away. By being open and honest and listing them in your statement it helps to document everything in one place and can help to highlight where you might need more resource to action the fixes and actually get the work done. And it feels great when you finally get the work done and you can tick the work off your list.

University of Edinburgh Accessibility Statement

Non-EdWeb sites need an accessibility statement

Sites outside of EdWeb need their own accessibility statement too. It’s no longer permissible to link to another sites accessibility statement.

We have an excellent and detailed step by step guide to writing an accessibility statement on our support wiki. So there are no excuses!

Step by step guide to using the accessibility statement template [University login needed]

Appendix 1 – Work we have completed to make EdWeb more accessible:

Work deployed 09 April 2020.

Colour contrasts

While some of the colour contrasts failed the WCAG 2.1 guidelines by a very small margin it is still essential that these kind of errors are periodically mended.

Updating the global footer

The heading ‘The University of Edinburgh’ font colour was not of a sufficient contrast with the background colour.

Link colour on search page tabs

The contrast between the tab link colour and background colour on the search results pages was not of a sufficient contrast.

Link colour change for ‘Bright Pink’ theme

The link colour for panels using the bright pink colour theme was not of a sufficient contrast with the background.

Ellipsis colour for pagination controls

The ellipsis colour for pagination controls for Profiles page was not of a sufficient contrast.

Design updates

Make Call to Action buttons responsive

Our button design wasn’t fully responsive so the text would flow off the page on a mobile device or if the font size had been magnified.

‘Type ahead’ feature removed from search results text field

The ‘Type ahead’ feature in the text field of the search page was not of a sufficient contrast. The JavaScript used also created a field without a label. This has now been removed.

Label added to Custom HTML on homepage

Custom HTML asset form labels were causing accessibility errors on the homepage

Content Management System editorial updates

Empty headings in page content

Empty headings are no longer rendered on the page.

Remove align table property from Rich Text Editor

The align table property has been removed from the Rich Text Editor. This attribute has been removed from HTML5. It can also create accessibility errors and cause problems with assistive technology.

Empty table headers

Content containing empty table headers can no longer be saved. All future content will have full table headings. On older content there may be some occurrences where this will still exist but will be corrected over time. 30 pages containing older content and this error were updated manually and corrected.

Empty link creation

It was possible for editors to create and leave empty links on the page. These will no longer render on live content.

Title attribute added to media asset iframe code

Added a title attribute to media asset iframe code to indicate to screen reader users that the content is a video.