Web accessibility

Using Science Museum Group websites

The Board of Trustees of the Science Museum, Exhibition Road, London SW7 2DD (‘the Science Museum Group’, also referred to in this statement as ‘we’, ‘our’ or ‘us’) operates a number of websites (‘our websites’) and we would like as many people as possible to be able to use them.

You should be able to do things like:

• change colours, contrast levels and fonts
• zoom in up to 300% without the text spilling off the screen
• navigate most of our websites using just a keyboard
• navigate most of our websites using speech recognition software
• listen to most of our websites using a screen reader (including the most recent versions of JAWS, NVDA and VoiceOver)

This statement explains what what we know about the accessibility of each of the websites we operate, what we are doing to address the accessibility of our websites and how to contact us about web accessibility.

How accessible are our websites

We are working to improve the accessibility of all our websites, but we know that some areas are not yet fully accessible.

In particular, we know that you may encounter:

• PDF and office documents that are not properly formatted to be accessible
• Images with missing or unhelpful alternative text
• Iframes without titles and videos without closed captions or transcripts
• HTML and ARIA markup errors that may make using a screen reader difficult

We are also aware of some instances of images that flash more than three times in a second.  We are working to remove those as soon as possible.

Contacting us about our websites

Email webaccessibility@sciencemuseumgroup.ac.uk if:

• you cannot access the information you need on our websites and would like to request it in an alternative format (like accessible PDF, large print, easy read, audio recording or braille)
• you find any problems that aren’t listed on this page or think we’re not meeting the requirements of the accessibility regulations
• you would like to ask anything or tell us anything about the accessibility of our websites

We want to improve our web accessibility and we welcome your feedback. We will respond in no more than 5 working days, but hope to do it more quickly than that in most cases.

Contacting us about physical visits

If you need any assistance or information to help you plan a visit to one of our museums, please use the following contact details:

Enforcement procedure

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) is responsible for enforcing 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 our websites’ accessibility

The Science Museum Group is committed to making their websites accessible, in accordance with the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018.  In this section, you will find more detailed information about the accessibility of our websites and their conformity to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 level AA.  The known issues are not an exhaustive list, but an attempt to summarise the main problems we found on each site.

Please email webaccessibility@sciencemuseumgroup.ac.uk if you would like to know more about our testing or any specific results.

What we’re doing to improve accessibility

The Science Museum Group runs many websites that were developed at different times using different technologies. We are committed to providing websites that are accessible to all and we are working hard to achieve that, but it will take some time due to the scale and complexity of the task.

In the ‘Detailed information about the accessibility of our websites’ section, we list the accessibility plan for individual websites as follows:

• ‘Remediation in progress‘ which means that our web editors and developers are currently working on fixing the accessibility problems found during testing
• ‘Being redeveloped‘ which means that the redevelopment of the website is in progress
• ‘In discussion‘ which means that a decision has not yet been reached about the website

Some websites will be retired and the content or services consolidated.

We are also:

• rolling out accessibility training to staff who create web content
• raising general accessibility awareness across the organisation
• investigating how we can fix our PDF documents and videos
• updating our procurement policies and contracts
• writing new guidelines for external developers

How we test accessibility

Using testing technology from PowerMapper, we scanned just over 250,000 web pages during September 2019. Sites are scanned automatically once a month. Some websites have also been tested manually in-house or by 3rd party agencies.

This statement was prepared on 23 September 2019. It was last updated on 23 September 2019.