Accessibility Statement

Pembroke College is committed to providing an accessible web presence that gives members of the public and members of the University community full access to information, courses and activities offered publicly through the web.

This Accessibility Statement will apply to the Pembroke College website. The site was built in 2021 and aims to meet the standards of The Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) Accessibility Regulations 2018. If you have any feedback or questions please get in touch with the Communications Team.

Our aims

In order to ensure that all of our visitors can use our website, these pages aim to meet Level-AA standard of WCAG 2.1. This includes elements such as:

  • Most of the website can be used with a screen reader
  • Most of the website can be navigated using just a keyboard
  • Zoom up to 200% without text spilling off the screen
  • Content is structured, ordered and labelled appropriately and website text is as easy to understand as possible
  • Alt text for all images and non-visual alternatives where appropriate

AbilityNet has advice on making your device easier to use if you have a disability. In addition, major operating systems produce the following guidance:

How accessible this website is

We are aware that some areas of our website are not fully accessible:

  • Some PDFs and word documents are not fully accessible to screen readers.
  • Not all multimedia content has captions, text or audio description.

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 always 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: 

communications@pmb.ox.ac.uk

Catherine Beckett
Head of Communications
Pembroke College Oxford
OX1 1DW

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

Pembroke College is committed to making its website accessible, in accordance with the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018.

Compliance status

This website is partially compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1 AA standard, due to the non-compliances listed below.

Non-accessible content

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

Non-compliance with the accessibility regulations

Issues with PDFs and Word documents

  • A lot of PDFs and word documents do not comply with requirements, particularly with regard to being accessible to screen readers (WCAG 2.1 4.1.2). One way in which we are compensating for this with some of our more important documents, such as the student handbook, is to list much of the important information elsewhere on the website in accessible HTML pages, and to ensure that those parts which are only relevant to current students are provided as content on our intranet site. We are also encouraging staff to move away from uploading PDFs where possible and will provide guidelines for staff to upload more accessibility-friendly documents. All pdf documents can be requested in alternative formats.

Issues with video and audio

  • Not all video content has captions, text or audio description (WCAG 2.1 1.2). Where we use embedded video on our site we may not always use captioning; where video is audio free, we may not always provide an alternative. Although our video hosting platform is YouTube, which creates generally good auto-generated captions, we acknowledge that there are often inaccuracies in these. To resolve this we have begun to regularly subtitle new uploads. We will continue with the proper captioning of videos, and where possible encourage pre-written transcripts from staff providing video content.

  • Not all audio has captions or text description (WCAG 2.1 1.2). Where we use embedded audio on our site, we may not always provide an alternative. We are working to provide transcripts or other alternatives to these instances on our site.

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

PDFs and other documents

The accessibility regulations do not require us to fix PDFs or other documents published before 23 September 2018 if they’re not essential to providing our services.

Live video

Live video streams are used minimally on our site; we do not plan to add captions to live video streams because live video is exempt from meeting the accessibility regulations.

Third party content

We often create content which is hosted on third party platforms. This includes:

  • Content we create for social media
  • Video we host on YouTube
  • Publications on Flipsnack and Issuu

We are responsible for ensuring the content we supply meets accessibility requirements; however, we are not responsible for the accessibility of the platforms themselves. We are not responsible for the accessibility of third party content or to other sites we link to.

Preparation of this accessibility statement

This statement was prepared on 28 June 2021. It was last reviewed on 07 April 2022.

This website was tested for accessibility by Pembroke College and Olamalu throughout its development in June 2021. We ran manual tests against the accessibility checklist created by 18F on a sample of pages and content types. Following the completion of that work, we aim to review the website in January 2023. We aim to make sure all new content is compliant and we continue to test pages regularly to ensure they are compliant.