Accessibility statement for the Destination STEM website

Destination STEM is committed to providing and maintaining an accessible website for all those who wish to access it. This page summarises how accessible our website currently is and our plans to improve it.

Our current measures to support accessibility

We want as many people as possible to be able to use our website. On most pages of our website, you should be able to:

• zoom in up to 500% without the text extending past the viewport

• navigate just using a keyboard

• navigate using speech recognition software

• listen to content using a screen reader

Conformance status

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) defines requirements for designers and developers to improve accessibility for people with disabilities. It defines three levels of conformance: Level A, Level AA, and Level AAA. Destination STEM is partially conformant with WCAG 2.1 level AA. Partially conformant means that some parts of the content do not fully conform to the accessibility standard.

Known parts of this website that are not fully accessible

• Some information is only available in PDF and Word format and haven’t been designed for accessibility. They may contain language and phrases which may exclude users along with font sizes which may not meet accessibility levels. We cannot ensure the accessibility of our contributions.

• Some of our images may be missing or have incorrect alternative text. With the scale our website, we may have missed accompanying alternative text. We continually audit our images to make sure they have the correct alternative text.

• Videos may not have descriptive text transcript. We check all our videos systematically and add the descriptive text transcript where possible.

• A few areas of text on the website do not meet the Level AAA, we are continually developing our webpages to ensure we increase the font size of the text throughout and meet Level AA as a minimum. Some pages may have incorrect heading structures.

Going forward

Although our goal is WCAG 2.1 Level AA conformance, we have also applied some Level AAA success criteria. The main font used throughout the website has a colour contrast meeting Level AAA. Going forward we are making it a priority to meet the Level AAA for our users.

Feedback

We welcome your feedback on the accessibility of our website. Please let us know if you encounter any accessibility barriers to accessibility@stem.org.uk.

Technology

Our accessibility relies on the following technologies to work with the combination of web browser and any assistive technologies or plugins installed on your computer:

• HTML

• CSS

• JavaScript

• AJAX

These technologies are relied upon for conformance with the accessibility standards used.

How we test our website

We use a combination of methods to check the accessibility of our site:

• Automated testing: we use WAVE, an automated plugin which scans our pages for accessibility errors and highlights the elements to fix.

• Manual testing: we have an accessibility checklist to manually audit areas of our website. This includes checking our pages can be navigated using only a keyboard and testing any colour contrasts that could not be automatically checked.

• User testing: we talk to people who have access needs, asking them how we can address the problems they face when using our website.

What we’re doing to improve accessibility

• We are starting to move our web content onto newer templates which have accessibility features built into them from the start.

• External suppliers of our online systems have been asked about the standards that their systems meet, and when they plan to meet the required standards if they do not already do so.

• We are ensuring that our development processes include accessibility considerations and testing as standard.

Date

This statement was created on 15th February 2024.