Accessibility statement for www.bathspa.ac.uk

This accessibility statement applies to the www.bathspa.ac.uk website. It does not apply to content on other bathspa.ac.uk subdomains.

This website is run by the Web team (part of Marketing and Applicant Communications) in close partnership with the External Affairs Unit at Bath Spa University.

We want as many people as possible to be able to use this website. For example, that means you should be able to:

  • zoom in up to 300% without the text spilling off the screen
  • navigate most of the website using just a keyboard
  • navigate most of the website using speech recognition software
  • listen to most of the website using a screen reader

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. Additionally, major operating systems produce the following guidance:

How accessible this website is

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

  • you cannot modify the line height or spacing of text
  • some older PDF documents are not fully accessible to screen reader software
  • live video streams (e.g. graduation live streams) do not have captions
  • some of our online forms may be difficult to navigate using just a keyboard
  • some heading elements are not consistent
  • some images do not have image descriptions
  • some HTML elements have empty tags

Feedback and contact information

If you experience difficulties accessing information on this website and need it in a different format such as accessible PDF, large print, easy read, audio recording or braille, please email web@bathspa.ac.uk.

We'll review your request and will get back to you within five working days.

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 or think we’re not meeting accessibility requirements, contact the Web Team: web@bathspa.ac.uk.

We'll respond as soon as possible but this will be no more than five working days.

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).

Contacting us by phone or visiting us in person

Find out how to contact the University.

If you’d like more information about accessibility and resources for students, please visit our Student Wellbeing Services’ Accessibility and Disability page.

Technical information about this website’s accessibility

Bath Spa University 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

This website is partially compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 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.

Non-compliance with the accessibility regulations

  • A small number of pages may have duplicate titles. This fails WCAG 2.1 success criterion 2.4.2 (Page Titled).
    We aim to fix this issue by August 2024.
  • A small number of pages have incorrect heading structures. This fails WCAG 2.1 success criterion 2.4.6 (Headings and Labels).
    We aim to fix this issue by August 2024.
  • A small number of images may not always have suitable image descriptions. This fails WCAG 2.1 success criterion 1.1.1 (Non-text Content).
    We aim to fix this issue by August 2024.
  • There may be some alternative text for images that are identical to the link text. This fails WCAG 2.1 success criterion 1.1.1 (Non-text Content).
    We aim to fix this issue by August 2024.
  • A small number of images may contain text. This fails WCAG 2.1 success criterion 1.4.5 (Images of Text).
    We aim to fix this issue by August 2024.
  • Link text is not always identified in ways other than colour. This fails WCAG 2.1 success criterion 1.4.1(Use of Colour).
    We aim to fix this issue by August 2024.
  • Some link tags are empty. This fails WCAG 2.1 success criterion 2.4.4 (Link Purpose (In Context), and 4.1.2 (Name, Role, Value)).
    This is caused by incorrectly coded HTML templates within our Content Management System.
    We aim to fix this issue by August 2024.

Disproportionate burden

At this time, we have not made any disproportionate burden claims.

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. 

Any new PDFs or Word documents we publish will meet accessibility standards.

Live video

We do not plan to add captions to live video streams because live video is exempt from meeting the accessibility regulations.

Discover Uni Widget

The colour contrast of the text on the Discover Uni widget on undergraduate course pages does not have sufficient colour contrast for visually impaired users. This doesn't meet WCAG 2.1 success criterion 1.4.3 (contrast (minimum)). Additionally there is no mechanism that allows control over the animation within the different Discover Uni panels. This doesn't meet WCAG 2.1 success criterion 2.2.2 (pause, stop, hide).

When a course contains more than one Discover Uni widget on the same page, there are duplicate id attribute values. This doesn't meet WCAG 2.1 success criterion 4.1.1 Parsing.

The Discover Uni widgets are mandated third-party content that is neither funded nor developed by us, nor under our control.

What we’re doing to improve accessibility

Accessibility roadmap

Over the last 12 months (since June 2022) we have completed a series of accessibility enhancement project sprints to address some of the major accessibility issues that were present on the Bath Spa University website. A log of these changes can be found below.

A small number of minor issues may still be encountered as outlined in the non-compliance section above. We are continuing to identify all instances of these and aim to fix them by September 2023. We are also in the process of adding an in-house technical role to our team which will help us to investigate any potential issues and maintain accessibility standards moving forward.

As our website is regularly updated with new content and design elements, we perform automated and manual checks every 3 months to continually assess the accessibility of the website. The next accessibility review will be in December 2023.

Accessibility improvements

View a summary of the issues fixed since June 2022.

Preparation of this accessibility statement

This statement was prepared on 30 August 2022. It was last reviewed on 08 March 2024.

This website was last tested in March 2024 by the Bath Spa Web Team. We used a combination of simple manual checks and automated tests to find common barriers to users with accessibility needs.

We tested a sample set of pages that represent the main templates and page layouts that are available within our content management system.

Manual checks included using each page without a mouse, viewing the page at different zoom settings, and simulating viewing the page on a small screen.

The automated tests were completed using: