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Website accessibility statement

This accessibility statement applies to Royal Papworth Hospital NHS Foundation Trust’s website. 

We want as many people as possible to be able to use and navigate our website, understanding the content and text within it. We are therefore committed to providing an accessible web presence for everyone who visits our website.

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 (opens in a new tab). WCAG 2.2 came into force in October 2024 and we will soon be auditing our site to ensure we meet these new standards. 

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

Making changes to your device or system

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

How accessible this website is

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

  • 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
  • Our calendar isn’t accessible as we would like, although it is still relatively easy to use with screen readers

Staff members responsible for updating the website are trained to follow accessibility standards when creating new content. 

Feedback and contact information

Reporting accessibility problems on our website

If you find any problems not listed on this page or think we’re not meeting accessibility requirements, please contact the communications team who are responsible for keeping the website updated:

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

We’ll consider your request and get back to you in 28 days.

If you cannot view the map on our ‘getting here’ page, call or email us on papworth.communications@nhs.net for directions.

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) (opens in a new tab).

Technical information about this website’s accessibility

Royal Papworth Hospital NHS Foundation Trust 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

The website is partially compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1 AA standard. (opens in a new tab) due to the non-compliances and exemptions listed below.

Non-accessible content  

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

Non-compliance with the accessibility regulations

  • Some documents are in less accessible formats, such as PDF. Non-HTML documents published on or after 23 September 2018 must have an accessible format. The content management system that we use holds old versions of documents for auditing purposes, which may not be tagged or titled correctly. These are not live on the website and cannot be found by users navigating our website, even though they are on the server. 

  • Some of our video content may not be correctly captioned and subtitled. This fails WCAG 2.0 success criterion 1.2.2. Captions (Prerecorded), 1.2.3. Audio Description or Media Alternative (Prerecorded), and 1.2.5. Audio Description (Prerecorded). 

We are actively working to address these issues as part of an ongoing programme to improve the accessibility of this website

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.

Many documents are not accessible in a number of ways including missing text alternatives and missing document structure e.g titles and tags. We are working through these to make sure that our documents have appropriate page titles and tags. 

The content management system that we use holds old versions of documents for auditing purposes, which may not be tagged or titled correctly. These are not live on the website and cannot be found by users navigating our website, even though they are on the server. 

There is work to do on making our PDFs accessible. Due to the number of these, we have a plan to either fix these or replace them with accessible HTML pages by the end of 2025. 

Video and embedded content

Some of our video content may not be correctly captioned and subtitled. We are reviewing all our video content to address this.

Where videos are old, to not break the YouTube URL or the ID of the video, some videos may have transcripts instead of captions.

Live video

We do not plan to add captions to live video streams because live video is exempt from meeting the accessibility regulations (opens in a new tab).

What we’re doing to improve accessibility

We want our website to offer the best experience possible for all our users. In addition to our plan to fix known issues, we continue to work on website content and structure.

We are working with our supplier to fix existing issues and think about future developments.

How we tested this site

We match our website against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.2 level A and level AA to test how accessible it is.

Working with our website provider, we manually test our website to highlight any accessibility issues. The last test was performed against WCAG 2.1 AA standards in August 2021. 

On 30 August 2024, this website was tested against the WCAG 2.1 AA standard, using a mixture of simple manual checks and automated tests to find only the most common barriers to users with accessibility needs.

The test was carried out by the accessibility monitoring team at the Government Digital Service, part of the Cabinet Office.

You can read the full accessibility test report.

Preparation of this accessibility statement

This statement was prepared on 12 August 2021. It was last reviewed on 8 November 2024.

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