Why accessibility is important to us
At the Arts Council we believe that culture is universal in its appeal, and it should be made available to and enjoyed by, everyone, everywhere. That’s why we’ve worked hard to ensure that this website is accessible to people with disabilities. This, in turn, helps to create a more user-friendly experience for all visitors to this site.
What we’ve done to help accessibility
In order to reach a high level of accessibility, we work hard to follow the international accessibility guidelines provided by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C WCAG 2).
The key areas we’ve improved on our site to meet the guidelines include:
Keyboard accessibility: Any user who has difficulty using their mouse may find it easier to navigate the web using their keyboard. We’ve made sure that, wherever practical, functionality is accessible from the keyboard.
Screen reader accessibility: Users with little to no useful vision often use software called a screen reader. This reads out onscreen content using synthetic speech and allows people with little to no useful vision access to website providing they are marked up appropriately. We’ve made sure that input fields in forms are all labelled properly, and user interface elements like tabs, are designed to be accessible for screen reader users.
Flexible layout: We have designed our website to be responsive so that it works equally on computers, phones, and tablets. This also allows the site to scale easily as you zoom in, making it more usable.
In addition, we strive to make the website more usable for everyone by:
- Making good use of headings, and white space, to make content easier to read
- Having a consistent navigation structure, so it is easy to tell where you are, and how to get elsewhere
- Using colours that provide good contrast; particularly important as we recognise that you may be reading our website on your phone and outside in the open
Technical specifications:
Accessibility of the Digital Culture Compass relies on the following technologies to work with the particular combination of web browser and any assistive technologies or plugins installed on your computer:
- HTML
- CSS
- Javascript
These technologies are relied upon for conformance with the accessibility standards used.
Existing accessibility problems:
We have not yet managed to achieve full accessibility of our core Digital Culture Tracker tool. We continue to work on this and will update our Accessibility Statement when this has been done. The issues are:
- The Tracker's navigation menu cannot be tabbed through, making navigation using keyboard alone difficult.
- The Tracker relies on javascript to update key values. Disabling javascript will make the tracker unusable.
- The Tracker has some elements (submit/save buttons) that do not have a unique ID.
- The Tracker contains some links that do not have descriptive title text
- The Tracker contains some form elements without labels
Assessment approach:
Arts Council England assessed the accessibility of the Digital Culture Compass by the following approaches:
- Self-evaluation
Adjusting your computer to make websites easier to use
There are some changes you can make to your computer to make any website, including ours, easier to see and use on your computer, mobile phone, or tablet. We have listed some useful resources below to help you do this. You can also take a look at My Computer My Way a resource developed by AbilityNet with support from Microsoft and the BBC as a source of accessibility help for all computer users. This unique resource explains all the accessibility features available in popular desktop computers, laptops, tablets and smartphones, including Windows, Mac OSX, iOS, Android and Windows Phone. All of these devices have features that enable people to adapt their computer to suit their needs, such as changing the colours and text size or using voice activation. Take a look at My Computer My Way to find out more about what features you could be using.
If you have dyslexia, or difficulty reading content:
You may find that changing the colours on screen, using larger text, or using a different font, will be helpful. The following links describe some ways you can adjust your device:
If you have a vision impairment:
You may find content difficult or impossible to read onscreen.
A free option, which is built into the majority of devices, is the ability to zoom in on content. On a computer, this can be done in your web browser by holding down the control key (ctrl), and then using the mouse wheel to zoom in and zoom out. Keyboard users can do the same by using ctrl and + to zoom in, and ctrl and – to zoom out.
Further reading that may be useful:
Having content spoken out loud to you
Feedback
We would love to have your feedback so that we can continue to improve our website and help with any difficulties you may encounter. If you have any feedback or are finding difficulties using our website please use our contact form.