September 2021

Website Accessibility Statement

This is a “living document”, which will be kept up to date as the content of both our website and also our training content (the ‘Learning Hub’) changes and our plans for accessible content evolve.

This statement refers to both our website which can be found at www.musically.com and also our learning hub which resides at http://learn.musically.com.

We want as many people as possible to be able to use this website. 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’ve 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.

We know some parts of our website and learning hub are not fully accessible:

  • most older PDF documents are not fully accessible to screen reader software
  • live video streams do not have captions
  • you cannot skip to the main content when using a screen reader
  • there’s a limit to how far you can magnify the map on our ‘contact us’ page

Pictures of event or information posters, when provided by a third party – where possible we provide the information from the picture, within the web page’s text (via HTML). We will encourage all providers of these pictures to provide accessible alternatives in future.

Some images do not have a text alternative, so people using a screen reader cannot access the information. This fails WCAG 2.1 success criterion 1.1.1 (non-text content). Text alternatives for all images will be added from September 2021 onwards. Older images may not have text alternatives and so will be ignored by screen readers. We think this is preferable as most images are not essential for the context of the news articles. When we publish new content we’ll make sure our use of images meets accessibility standards.

Some PDFs published since 2010 are not in an accessible format, so people using a screen reader cannot access the information. When we publish new content we’ll make sure an accessible version of our PDF is also made available.

It’s not always possible to change the device orientation from horizontal to vertical without making it more difficult to view the content.

It’s not possible for users to change text size without some of the content overlapping.

Interactive Maps

Maps displayed by Google Maps – we don’t control how Google Maps displays information, but where possible we provide addresses within the web page’s text (via HTML). When Google makes their map output accessible, we will update our technology accordingly.

PDFs and other documents

Some of our PDFs and Word documents are essential to providing our services. For example, we have PDFs with information on how users can access our services, and forms published as Word documents.

Live video

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

Recorded video

We produce a number of training videos, we will be adding closed captions to these from January 2022.

What we’re doing to improve accessibility

We are updating the code of our website so that our web pages meet WCAG 2.1AA standards by the end of 2022.

We will be training team members who input website content about accessibility requirements and how to review new web pages from September 2021 onwards.

We will review the progress towards deadlines set out in this statement regularly.

Preparation of this accessibility statement

This statement was prepared on September 21st 2021.
It was last updated on September 29th, 2021.