Accessibility

nasen is committed to ensuring digital accessibility so that our website is usable by everybody. We are continually improving the user experience for everyone by not only applying the relevant accessibility standards, but also, ultimately, seeking to go further than compliance to be sector leading.

Preparation of this accessibility statement

This statement was prepared on March 2023. It was last reviewed on March 2023.

This website was last tested in April 2022. The test was carried out by our software partners PanLogic.

Group of primary school children in red uniform gathered around a computer with their teacher

Working alongside our external website support we have developed our site to comply with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) version 2.1 Level AA and we keep the site under review to improve both its accessibility and usability. Whilst Level AA is recognised as good practice we are continuing to refine and develop our site, working towards Level AAA compliance.

We have built our website to be accessible with common assistive technologies and different ways of using websites. This means that you can:

  • Navigate the menus and all interactive functionality without a mouse and using assistive technology such as a screen reader.
  • Increase the font size or zoom in on content.
  • Navigate a page using headings throughout our written content. 
  • Consume media content with captions or transcripts for videos and audio content.
  • Navigate our websites with assistive technology via embedded landmarks and ARIA functionality.

We also recognise that true accessibility involves not just compliance with best practice such as WCAG but also ensuring that all our content that can be easily accessed, understood and perceived. As such we strive to use plain English principles to make our content clear and easy to understand. Again, we know there is always more we can do.

We've designed our content to be as accessible as possible. However, we recognise that some content is not yet accessible. Potential problems that we are working on improving include:

  • Embedded video and audio players can sometimes be difficult to use with assistive technology.
  • PDFs and documents are not always accessible, especially to screen reader software.
  • We aim to provide captions and/or transcripts with all our videos but that might not be available for older videos.
  • We do not provide audio descriptions for videos but aim to provide visual content in alternative formats where possible.

Whilst we continue to improve if you need information or resources from this website in a different format, like accessible PDF, large print, easy read, audio recording or Braille, please contact us.

Parts of this website are not fully accessible. For example:

  • We are aware that downloadable documents and PDFs published before September 2018 may not be fully accessible. We are working to ensure those still in use are available in an accessible alternative format and are working on moving away from using PDF format for future documents. 
  • We also recognise that some older recorded webinars and videos do not have captions as they were not created at the time of recording. If you encounter a video without captions and need assistance accessing the content, then please contact us.

Our site is regularly reviewed with manual audits by our website support consultants and by scans with automated testing tools. In addition, we carry out user testing with our members. Testing with real users gives us valuable feedback about the real-world accessibility of our site.

Where content is not accessible, we will state a reason, warn users and offer alternatives.

We do not provide bolted-on accessibility tools as we have focussed on ensuring that we support everyone’s personal device settings and assistive technologies to highest standard possible.

Web pages are reviewed by their content owners every 6 months and resources are reviewed annually.

We're always looking to improve the accessibility of this website, we know it is a journey that can never be complete. If you experience any accessibility problems or think there are ways we could do more, please contact us to report this. As always, we are incredibly grateful to our members for their generosity in sharing their knowledge and expertise and website accessibility is no different.
 

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