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Southampton Solent University logo

Accessibility statement

This accessibility statement applies to the Solent University website: https://www.solent.ac.uk.

This website is run by Solent University. We want as many people as possible to be able to use this website. For example, that means you should be able to:

  • Zoom in up to 400% without issues
  • Navigate the website using just a keyboard
  • Navigate the website using speech recognition software
  • Use a screen reader (including the most recent versions of JAWS, NVDA and VoiceOver.

We've also made the website text as simple as possible to understand.

How accessible this website is

We know some parts of this website are not fully accessible:

  • Most older PDF documents are not fully accessible to screen reader software.
  • Videos will have captions but they have been auto generated and may not be accurate. We are part way through a project to make captions accurate, add transcripts, and add audio descriptions. We anticipate this work to be completed in December 2022.
  • Some links may have the same name.
  • A screen reader may not fully work, or may be confusing, on some sections of the website.

Feedback and contact information

We welcome your feedback on the accessibility of the Solent University website. Please let us know if you encounter accessibility barriers on the website. If you would like to request information on this website in a different format:

We try to respond to feedback within three working days.

Reporting accessibility problems with this website

We're always looking to improve the accessibility of this website. If you find any problems not listed on this page or think we’re not meeting accessibility requirements, please contact the Digital Platforms team: web.support@solent.ac.uk.

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

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

Compliance status

This website is partially compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1 AA standard due to the the non-compliances and exemptions listed below.

Non-accessible content

The content listed below is non-accessible for the following reasons.

Non-compliance with the accessibility regulations

Pre-recorded videos do not have captions:

Embedded forms:

  • We use embedded forms across our site that are supplied by a third party. As the forms are embedded via an iframe, it means that some pages will report that they have two 'Main' landmarks on a page. WCAG 1.3.1: Info and Relationships.
  • We know the forms have some invalid HTML issues but we are unable to resolve these as we do not have access to the source code. WCAG 4.1.1: Parsing.
  • We do not have a timescale to resolve these issues as they are out of our control.
  • Example page: https://www.solent.ac.uk/about/contact-us

Popup modals:

Visible label and accessible name do not match

Colour contrast is not sufficient

Disproportionate burden

Document conversion: Disproportionate burden assessment

Our site contains many PDF, Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents that have been created across many different departments in the University and uploaded to the website. We do not intend to audit and fix document accessibility issues as this would be a disproportionate burden.

Marketing documents: Disproportionate burden assessment

Our site contains many PDFs been created from our printed marketing material. Many of these documents have lots of pages and we do not create an accessible version of each document as this would be a disproportionate burden.

News articles: Disproportionate burden assessment

Our site contains many news articles that have been created by multiple editors over many years. News articles are rarely updated once published but do remain on the site as an archive of information. We do not run an accessibility check on each news article.

Events: Disproportionate burden assessment

Our site contains pages with event details that are created by many editors from around the University. We do not immediately remove historic events from the website once the event date has passed and therefore there can be many event pages on the site. We do not run an accessibility check on each event page.

Videos published before September 2020: Disproportionate burden assessment

Our site may contain historic videos that were published before 23 September 2020. While most of our videos embedded across the website will have been replaced with new accessible versions, there are still some instances of old videos that are publicly available.

Content that’s not within the scope of the accessibility regulations

PDFs and other documents

PDFs or other documents published before 23 September 2018 (if they’re not essential to providing our services) as they are exempt from meeting the accessibility regulations 4.2 (a).

Live video

We do not plan to add captions to live video streams because live video is exempt from meeting the accessibility regulations 4.2 (c).

Pre-recorded video

We do not plan to add captions or transcripts for pre-recorded audio and video published before 23 September 2020 as they are exempt from meeting the accessibility regulations 4.2 (b).

Third-party content

We may occasionally publish or embed content created by third-parties (that is neither funded nor developed by Solent University) that is not fully accessible. This content is deemed exempt from meeting the accessibility regulations - 4.2 (e).

What we’re doing to improve accessibility

The Digital Platforms team are committed to providing an accessible experience. As such, we have built many checks into different phases of our team processes:

  • Design
  • Development
  • UAT and functional testing
  • Content approval

Following these processes ensures that we are considering accessibility at multiple points during the development and publishing of new content across the website.

We also utilise an automated accessibility testing tool called Site Improve to monitor our sites accessibility health on a monthly basis.

In August 2022, an independent audit of this website will also take place by the Digital Accessibility Centre.

Preparation of this accessibility statement

This statement was prepared on 9 November 2020. It was last reviewed on 16 June 2022.

Between May and June 2022, we completed a full accessibility audit of the www.solent.ac.uk website. The full details of the audit can be viewed here.

  • The audit consisted of testing all unique pages and templates to ensure we meet WCAG 2.1 AA standards.
  • During the testing, we used a combination of automated and guided manual tests using tools such as:
    • Accessibility Insights for Web Chrome plugin (powered by axe-core 4.4.1)
    • AXE DevTools v4.29.0
    • Site Improve
  • This audit included thousands of tests across hundreds of pages and templates.
  • All issues found have either been fixed or added to this statement.


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