Oak National Academy
ClassroomTeacher Hub

Accessibility statement

Updated

This accessibility statement applies to the Oak National Academy websites at the addresses below. We refer to these collectively as “the website”.

  • www.thenational.academy
  • classroom.thenational.academy
  • teachers.thenational.academy
  • support.thenational.academy

This website is owned and operated by Oak National 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
  • 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. We use a service called Readable to regularly check the pages on our website are written simply.

AbilityNet has advice on making your device easier to use if you have a disability.

How accessible this website is

We build our sites to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1 standard, except where there are exceptions and areas of disproportionate burden as highlighted below. We know some parts of this website are not fully accessible:

  • We rely on third party tools for components of our lessons, including Google Slides, which have some limitations to how these can be accessed when embedded on a page
  • 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 signed.

We continuously improve the accessibility of the website, with updates including:

  • Captions for all videos
  • Signed versions of our videos for EYFS, key stage 1 and key stage 2 for English, Maths, Science, Geography, History, Computing and Art.
  • Signed versions of our videos for entire specialist curriculum
  • HTML markup improvements and validation
  • Colour contrast changes
  • Keyboard navigation support
  • A hidden “skip navigation” link
  • ARIA hints throughout
  • Ensuring we have fully tested in and adjusted the website for a variety of browsers
  • Automated testing in AXE, Pa11y
  • We provide full transcripts of our lessons in free text

We conduct independent accessibility audits yearly to identify and resolve any issues.

Feedback and contact information

If you need information on this website in a different format like accessible PDF, large print, easy read, audio recording or braille:

Reporting accessibility problems with this website

We’re looking to improve the accessibility of this website. If you find any problems not listed on this page or think we’re not meeting accessibility requirements, contact [email protected].

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).

Technical information about this website’s accessibility

Oak National Academy is committed to making this website accessible, in accordance with the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018.

Compliance status

This website is compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1, except where there are exceptions and areas of disproportionate burden as highlighted in this statement.

Non-accessible content

The content listed below is non-accessible for the following reasons.

Non-compliance with the accessibility regulations

After initial upload, some video lessons may not have captioning. This is usually resolved within a few days. Furthermore, some foreign language videos may only have partial captioning in some parts. We may be unable to caption any live video content.

Disproportionate burden

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.

We use Hubspot to host a support knowledge base at support.thenational.academy. Some pages on this subdomain fail some automated accessibility checks. It is out of scope for us to design, build and host a knowledge base, so we rely on a third party service for this.

We’ve assessed the cost of fixing the issues 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.

Content that’s not within the scope of the accessibility regulations

Live video

We do not plan to add captions to live video streams because live video is exempt from meeting the accessibility regulations. However, we will apply best efforts to find an option for automated live captioning.

Preparation of this accessibility statement

This statement was prepared on 23 April 2020. It was last reviewed on 05 September 2022.

This 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.

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 also interrogate our website analytics using multiple tools to ensure that we test screen sizes and browser versions that are not the current version for each platform, but that represent a significant proportion of our visitors.

We have not yet defined what we would declare as a cut-off point for being a significant proportion. We intend on testing using devices, screen readers and browsers that are recommended to us by accessibility experts, ncluding those set out in the relevant gov.uk service manuals.

How you can help us improve

We appreciate your feedback and your understanding, particularly if you are experiencing a frustrating problem with accessing our lessons. We are keen to offer a service that supports as wide a set of needs as possible. If you have suggestions for improvements, please get in touch!