Accessibility statement
Updated
Introduction
This accessibility statement applies to the websites at the addresses below, which are owned and operated by Oak National Academy Limited. We refer to these collectively as “the website”:
- www.thenational.academy
- classroom.thenational.academy
- teachers.thenational.academy
- support.thenational.academy
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;
- Read and use most of the website while zoomed in up to 400%;
- 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.
There are many options for you to customise your web browser and device to help you navigate this (and other) websites more easily AbilityNet has helpful advice on making your device easier to use if you have a disability.
Feedback and contact information
We appreciate your feedback and your understanding, particularly if you are experiencing a frustrating problem with accessing parts of our website, including our lessons. We are keen to offer a service that supports as wide a set of needs as possible.
If you need information on this website in a different format, like accessible PDF, large print, easy read, audio recording or braille:
- Email [email protected]; or
- Use our ‘Feedback’ widget and provide us with your details.
- Report an issue by completing the short form found on our contact-us page, https://www.thenational.academy/contact-us
Please also contact us if you find any problems which are not listed on this page or think we’re not meeting accessibility requirements.
How accessible is our website
We are committed to making this website accessible, in accordance with the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018 (“the accessibility regulations”). We build our site to be compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 and the Draft Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.2. We are compliant with these standards except as highlighted below.
Non-accessible content
The content listed below is non-accessible for the following reasons:
Non-compliance with the accessibility regulations
We are aware of the following areas of non-compliance and have planned development work to address these:
- After initial upload, some video lessons may not have captioning. This is usually resolved within a few days;
- Some foreign language lesson videos may only have partial captioning
- Controls for a 'Feedback’ widget component are not keyboard accessible
- Skip links are missing which should allow users to bypass repeated elements such as the page navigation
- Page titles for the blog index, webinar and some ‘About Us’ pages do not reflect the content on the page
- An image on ‘Develop your curriculum’ page has alt text that does not describe the information within the image
- Some form fields are missing required attributes to let users know they are needed along with labels stating the fields are also required.
- Some video-only content does not have an appropriate alternative – such as text transcript
- An audio description has not been provided for webinar videos
- Colour has been used as the only method of conveying information for some links on the ‘About Us’ page
- Text can be found styled as a heading but does not have the appropriate HTML tag along with some pages having illogical heading hierarchies.
- Several buttons have generic label text which does not specify the button’s purpose
- Buttons that control interactive elements are missing appropriate attributes or labels
- Content is presented visually as a list, but the HTML structure does not reflect this
- Pages contain multiple header elements, but they have no unique names or labels to help differentiate them
- At 400% zoom there are some reflow issues with elements and when adjusting the text spacing some content is clipped off the page
- Error suggestion text is not specific about how to resolve issues
- Copied to clipboard toast notification does not allow users to dismiss or stop the toast themselves
- Inaccessible documents – the website includes PDFs that are essential to providing our services and that do not comply with the accessibility standards. We have commenced a programme of work to carry out checks on PDFs which are added to our website.
Disproportionate burden
We’ve assessed the cost of fixing the issues listed below with navigation and accessing information, and with interactive tools and transactions. We believe that doing so now would be a disproportionate burden within the meaning of the accessibility regulations.
We plan to review our delivery of quizzes as part of our product roadmap which would enable us to have full control of the accessibility of this part of Oak lessons. Related to this, we also are considering building our own mechanism for delivering slides but do not have this on our roadmap.
Navigation and accessing information
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 in some circumstances.
Interactive tools and transactions
Some of our interactive forms, presentations and other content may be difficult to navigate using a keyboard because they are produced by a team of non-technical people. Many of these content producers work on a voluntary basis. We are working to ensure that through our quality assurance process that we can ensure that all content produced in this way is accessible.
Some of our content is built and hosted using third party software, such as Google Slides and ‘skinned’ to look like our website, and have some limitations as to how they can be accessed when embedded on a page.
We use Hubspot to host a support knowledge base at support.thenational.academy. Some pages on this subdomain fail some automated accessibility checks.
What are we doing to improve accessibility
As highlighted above, we have work planned to address areas of non-compliance (except for cases of disproportionate burden).
The website currently undergoes daily automated quality assurance testing during our deployment process. We also do regular manual quality checks with Gov.uk’s published list of modern browsers. We regularly commission an independent accessibility audit on a sample of pages to highlight areas requiring improvement.
All of our lessons are tested to ensure that they can be viewed and completed. We perform browser testing for all the latest versions of major desktop and mobile browsers. We test using devices, screen readers and browsers that are recommended to us by accessibility experts, including those set out in the relevant gov.uk service manuals.
We have signed versions of our EYFS, key stage 1 and key stage 2 videos for English, Maths, Science, Geography, History, Computing and Art. We also have signed versions for our entire specialist curriculum. Other videos are not currently signed.
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).
Preparation of this accessibility statement
This statement was prepared on 29 June 2023 and is amended regularly, in line with any changes we make to our website.
Our website was last tested in February 2023 by Nomensa, who performed an expert evaluation of 10 pages against all level A and AA success criteria of WCAG 2.1 and 2.2 draft. Content was selected to make sure a good representation of different pages, templates and components were tested as well as key content.