We know some parts of this website are not fully accessible:

• Some third party videos do not have captions or transcripts.

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, think we’re not meeting accessibility requirements, or have some recommendations to improve your experience of the site, get in touch here.

This website is partially compliant with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 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:

• Third party videos — for some third-party videos that we’ve embedded on the site, we’ve reached out to the owners of those videos to request captions and transcripts so they meet criteria they are currently not meeting. This affects these videos:

• Te Karere TVNZ’s video on Ministry of Education | Te Tāhuhu o Te Mātauranga – Supporting school leavers to take the next step and 2019: A year of making things that matter, better which has English subtitles, but not captions or a transcript.

Preparation of this accessibility statement

This statement was prepared on 19th May 2021. 

The website was last tested on 13th May 2021. The test was carried out by accessibility specialists within Springload’s Test team.

Establishing and maintaining conformance

We have used various tools and approaches to establish and maintain conformance:

• Automated in-browser testing with Axe, Lighthouse, and Wave.
• Manual testing, including with OS X’s Voiceover.

Videos

We’ve based our approach to embedding video on Gov.uk’s accessible video player research.

We’ve used Otter.ai, as well as manual editing, to ensure that captions and transcripts of our videos are accurate and detailed.

Automated testing

You’ll notice that automated tools highlight potential issues with colour contrast on the site.

We have reviewed these issues in-depth, and have established them as “false positives” which highlight the need for manual testing and human insight. (Editor: I for one welcome our automated testing robot overlords).

The warnings are triggered by our use of a layered breadcrumb effect that you’ll notice on sub-pages. Tools like Axe and Lighthouse highlight that elements in the background layers do not have a sufficient colour contrast ratio.

The elements highlighted are in background layers and do not need to be seen, read, or used. They are hidden visually by being obscured by the foreground layer, and hidden to assistive technologies using the aria-hidden attribute.

Also highlighted by automated testing is our use of a role=”text” attribute on the Contact page, which is not a valid ARIA role. We have used this to fix a problem with how screen readers read this content, an issue highlighted by Axess Lab, in their post, “Text Splitting Causes Screen Reader Problems”.