Accessibility

Accessibility is a requirement of UK law. The University's webpages are subject to the Equality Act 2010 which brings together different equality laws including the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (DDA) and the extension to education in September 2002 by the Special Educational Needs and Disability Act 2001 (SENDA). 

The University's Accessibility Standard must be upheld (along with the other Rules) in all Web publishing.

The SENDA law refers to some of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 1.0) published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as part of their overall Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). This document is widely regarded as providing the definitive guidelines on accessibility for Web publishers, and is referred to for the University's own Accessibility Standard.

Some BASIC guidelines to never forget are:

• Include "ALT" text on all relevant images and buttons.
• Don't rely on colours to convey information.
• Identify changes in language – (as screen readers read all text as English).
• Don't rely on style sheets to convey information.
• Update content – especially dynamic content that is auto created – provide an accessible alternative.
• Don't use flickering, blinking or scrolling text.
• Use simple language.
• Label data tables.
• Use captions or audio descriptions on multimedia content.
• Make pages available without using applets or scripts.
• Provide audio descriptions for presentations.

The above guidelines are strongly recommended for implementation on all University of Huddersfield webpages.

However, if, after best efforts, you cannot create an accessible page, provide a link to an alternative page that uses W3C technologies, is accessible, has equivalent information (or functionality), and is updated as often as the inaccessible (original) page.