Accessibility statement

Updated 12 August 2021

Royal Papworth Hospital is committed to improving the accessibility of its website for people with disabilities. We are working to continually improve the user experience for everyone, and applying the standards set out in the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018.

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:
  • Alt text for all images and providing non-visual alternatives where appropriate
  • All essential audio-visual information is captioned, described as necessary or provided in alternative formats
  • Content can be navigated with just a keyboard or speech recognition tools
  • The website can be used with a screen reader
  • Content is structured, ordered and labelled appropriately

Measures to improve accessibility

 We have taken steps to improve the accessibility of our website, including:

  • Asking an external company to assess the accessibility of our website and make relevant changes to improve the user experience for people with disabilities.
  • Attending training so that staff members responsible for updating our website know how to create accessible content

We’ve also made the website text as simple as possible to understand. AbilityNet has advice on making your device easier to use if you have a disability.

How accessible this website is

We know that some elements of our website are not fully accessible. These include the following areas:

  • Our calendar isn’t accessible as we would like, although it is still relatively easy to use with screen readers
  • The ‘share’ button in the header of the website isn’t accessible using a keyboard and uses non-interactive elements. This uses third-party code that our website developer is not able to control.
  • Most of our older PDF documents are not fully accessible to screen reader software
  • Some older videos do not have captions
  • Some older images have alternative text

We have completed training so that staff members responsible for updating the website follow accessibility standards when creating new content. 

Disproportionate burden

We have assessed the cost of making all of the PDFs published on our website since September 2020 accessible and believe that this would be a disproportionate burden within the meaning of the accessibility regulations. However, we will make sure that any new PDFs or Word documents we publish will meet accessibility standards.

Reporting accessibility problems on our website

We want to continue to improve the accessibility of our website. If you find problems not listed above and would like us to try and resolve them, please email papworth.communications@nhs.net