Accessibility
Table of Contents
- Accessibility statement for Academics Guard
- Technical information about Academics Guard's accessibility
- Non accessible content
- How we tested Academics Guard
- What we’re doing to improve accessibility
Accessibility statement for Academics Guard
Academics Guard is run by Academics Guard. We want as many people as possible to be able to use Academics Guard. For example, that means you should be able to:
- change colours, contrast levels and fonts
- zoom in up to 300% without the text spilling off the screen
- navigate most of the website using just a keyboard
- navigate most of the website using speech recognition software
- listen to most of the website using a screen reader (including the most recent versions of JAWS, NVDA and VoiceOver)
We have also made the website text as simple as possible to understand.
AbilityNet has advice on making your device easier to use if you have a disability.
How accessible Academics Guard is
We know some parts of Academics Guard are not fully accessible:
- most older PDF documents are not fully accessible to screen reader software
Using the WAVE Accessbility checker tool we are also aware of alerts that it raises which cannot be resolved:
- empty listing of items displays "No Items" in the middle of the table that WAVE thinks should be a table caption. This is not appropriate and displaying a row with the text "No Otems" makes it clear there are no items whereas no rows at all might make it look as though something has broken.
What to do if you cannot access parts of Academics Guard
If you need information on Academics Guard in a different formats please contact our repository administrators. We will consider your request and will aim to get back to you within 7 working days.
Reporting accessibility problems with Academics Guard
We are always looking to improve the accessibility of Academics Guard. If you find any problems not listed on this page or think we are not meeting accessibility requirements, please contact us.
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 Academics Guard's accessibility
Academics Guard is committed to making its website accessible, in accordance with the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018.
Academics Guard is not compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1 AA standard. The non-accessible sections are listed below.
Non accessible content
The content listed below is non-accessible for the following reasons.
We are always looking to improve the accessibility of Academics Guard. If you find any problems not listed on this page or think we are not meeting accessibility requirements, contact by email: support@academicsguard.com.
Non compliance with the accessibility regulations
We are yet to compile a list of where and how Academics Guard is non-compliant with accessibility regulations.
Disproportionate burden
We are yet to compile a list of problems with fixing them would be a disproportionate burden.
Content that is not within the scope of the accessibility regulations
PDFs and other documents
As Academics Guard is an open access research repository, the principal content made available to users are research outputs such as articles, papers, posters and reports, many of which are PDF documents. Many PDF documents, especially older ones, are not fully accessible to screen reader software and do not contain other common accessibility features. In particular:
- many documents, especially older ones, do not conform to the PDF/A archiving format.
- many lack bookmarks or document titles, therefore failing to meet WCAG 2.1 success criteria 2.4.5 and 2.4.2.
- many discuss scientific or scholarly concepts which may be abbreviated with no mechanism for discovering the meaning of the abbreviations, or unusual words arising from scholarly discourse without definitions. These issues each fail WCAG 2.1 criteria 3.1.4 and 3.1.1 respectively.
- there may be some documents that fail to specify their human language, thereby failing WCAG 2.1 success criterion 3.1.1.
- many documents may not reflow satisfactorily. This fails WCAG 2.1 success criterion 1.4.10.
The accessibility regulations do not require us to fix PDFs or other documents placed in Academics Guard's archive before 23 September 2019 as these items are considered "archives".
PDFs and other documents added after 23 September 2019 may be user provided and therefore not fully accessible. Academics Guard has a review process that should identify these before they are made available for download. If this is not the case please contact by email: support@academicsguard.com.
General issues
Areas of Academics Guard which are not document-based demonstrate good levels of accessibility. However, the following issues have been identified and are in the process of being addressed:
- Headings on some of our pages do not appear in a logical order. This does not meet WCAG 2.1 success criterion 2.4.10.
- Some of the forms and interactive search pages on Academics Guard are not appropriately labelled or do not have labels. This does not meet WCAG 2.1 success criterion 3.3.2.
- Interactive elements of Academics Guard (such as search) do not utilise status messages to update screen readers of a change in state. This does not meet WCAG 2.1 success criterion 3.2.2.
How we tested Academics Guard
Academics Guard was last comprehensively tested on 18 April 2021. You can read the comprehensive report.
Based on testing a default publication flavour installation of EPrints using standard test data, all tested public-facing and back-end administration pages currently report no errors or contrast errors. These pages may have one or more alerts. If so, these alerts are considered acceptable and/or essential for the functioning of EPrints as an Open Access repository and will fall into one of the following categories:
- Links to PDF documents.
- Duplications in the test or third-party data leading to alerts about shared alternative texts for nearby images.
- Reports of suspicious link texts that are not considered suspicious within the context of where they appear.
- Apparent missing table captions due to a feature in EPrints to make clear a table has no items rather than leaving the table empty.
It should be noted that whilst Chromium's WAVE extension that was used for testing. It did not report any contrast errors for any of the tested public-facing and back-end administration pages. However, Firefox's WAVE extension has been seen to report some contrast errors. Firefox's contrast errors are due to its default setting for the background colour of select form elements.
Miscellaneous pages like those for OAI metadata harvesting have been tested and found to have issues with tables being reported as being used for layout when they are genuinely being used as tables. However, as these pages are not intended for general human use, there is no intention to further address these issues.
What we’re doing to improve accessibility
Our accessibility roadmap shows how and when we plan to improve accessibility on Academics Guard.
This statement was first prepared on 2 December 2019. It was last updated on 7 August 2020.