Digital accessibility guide

Accessibility helps us to promote diversity, equity and inclusion. It is a cross-institutional responsibility. By making your content more accessible for disabled students and staff, you will be improving the experience for everyone.

This guidance supports creating accessible digital content and embedding inclusive practices. The resource is under development with new materials continuously added.

Find out more about what we're doing to promote Digital Accessibility at City, University of London.

Digital accessibility regulations

The Equality Act (2010) protects disabled staff and students from discrimination. The Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) Accessibility Regulations 2018 makes explicit the need for digital materials from public bodies to be accessible. In addition to the public-facing and internal websites, University online teaching, learning, research and staff platforms are included as part of the directive. These regulations came into force in the UK on 23^rd September 2018 and originate from the EU Web Accessibility Directive (2016/2102)

You can request caption correction for MediaSpace videos on the IT Self Service Portal.

You will need to provide the following information to help the team process your request.

• Links to videos hosted on MediaSpace
• Confirm your videos are set as Unlisted on Media Space
• Note any important deadlines (please note that we cannot guarantee any dates of delivery)
• If not currently hosted on MediaSpace, please add a note to the request form

1.  The University has a Digital Accessibility Working Group focusing on improving accessibility of digital content and systems. Membership ranges across the schools, staff and student groups and professional services. 
2. The University has invested in a three-year Digital Accessibility Project to provide expertise, tools and consultancy in order to audit, improve and develop maturity in Digital Accessibility in the University. 
3. There is student representation and engagement in projects, co creation of resources, testing, and recommending tools and approaches for digitally accessible practice.
4. Training programmes and online guidance have been developed and released for all staff roles and students to ensure they are aware of the requirements and have the skills needed to create and update content 
5. We have begun to review, write, document, and make available accessibility statements for all our digital systems. 
6. A tracked support request has been set up on the University service platform for staff digital accessibility queries. 
7. In our Online Learning Environment (Moodle), we enabled an instructor content accessibility reporting tool (Ally) on all our modules in July 2022.
8. In our Online Learning Environment (Moodle), we enabled a student automated format conversion tool (Ally) on all modules in July 2022. 
9. We have an annually agreed caption correction approach for educational audio and video and a budget to support this activity. 
10. We enabled automated captions and transcripts across all our educational multimedia platforms in 2022. 
11. We have an Opt Out Lecture Recording Policy for face to face and online lectures from 2022. 

As an owner of a website or an application, you may be required to include an Accessibility Statement to let users know how accessible the site is and what you are doing to improve accessibility, having an Accessibility Statement on your site shows that you respect users with disabilities and helps you comply with the law. Add it to a section that will be easy for users to find such as the footer, header, or sidebar.

The government has guidance on making your website or app accessible and publishing an accessibility statement.

You can review City’s accessibility statement and other educational technologies and services on our Accessibility statements blog.

You can request support from our Digital Accessibility section on the IT Self Service Portal.

We can help with:

• Making documents and Moodle module resources accessible,
• Caption correction,
• A disability referral.