Great Ormond Street Hospital is committed to providing a website that is accessible to the widest possible audience. We actively work to ensure that our website is accessible and usable by people of all abilities.
Accessibility guidelines
All pages of this website aim to conform to level AA of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0. These guidelines are the internationally recognised benchmark for building accessible websites.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines explain how to make web content more accessible for people with disabilities. Conformance with these guidelines also makes web content more user friendly for all people.
Web standards and technologies
This website has been built to comply with W3C standards for HTML and CSS. These technologies are relied upon throughout the site. The site displays correctly in all popular browsers, and degrades gracefully in older browsers.
In addition this website uses JavaScript and Flash. These technologies are not relied upon and the website works fairly well without them.
Known issues
At the time of writing there are a number of known issues on the Great Ormond Street Hospital website. We will be working to resolve these over the coming months. Each of these issues has been identified below along with an estimation of when we hope to have resolved each issue.
- Images do not always have appropriate alternative text. All images added from January 2012 will adhere to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
- The HTML mark up generated by our CMS is not always semantically appropriate. We are committed to working with our CMS vendor to address the issue.
- Some of the images in use on the website (particularly graphs and charts) rely on perception of colour alone to be understood. We are currently reviewing this and should have a resolution in place by the end of 2012;
- Some of the text on the website does not meet the minimum required contrast ratio for double A level accessibility. We have implemented a style switcher with a high contrast theme which resolves the issue;
- Some of the text on the website cannot be resized using native browser functionality alone. We are currently looking into the issue and aim to have a resolution in place by the end of June 2012;
- Some of the images on the website contain text that may not be accessible to people using assistive technologies such as screen readers. We aim to provide this information in alternative formats (wherever possible) by the end of June 2012;
- Groups of links have not always been marked up as list items. This can make it harder for people who use assistive technologies to skip over large blocks of links easily. From January 2012 groups of links are listed items and work is scheduled to update pre-existing links by the end of 2012;
- Some of the text used for links on the website is not sufficiently descriptive. From January 2012 we have used descriptive link text and work is scheduled to update pre-existing link text by the end of 2012;
- Some of the form fields on the website have not been correctly associated with their form labels. This can make it harder for people who use assistive technologies such as screen readers to identify the purpose of the form fields. We are committed to working with our CMS vendor to address the issue and hope to have a resolution in place by the end of June 2012;
- The human language of the pages (and subsections of some pages) on the website have not always been identified appropriately. This is likely to affect multi-lingual people who use assistive technologies such as screen readers. We aim to have a resolution in place for this issue by the end of June 2012;
Conformance date
This accessibility statement was issued on 15 May 2012.
Contact information
We are continually working to maintain the accessibility of this website. If you experience any problem accessing the site then please contact us.
