Figshare accessibility statement at St George’s, University of London
Website accessibility statement in line with Public Sector Body (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018
This website is run for St George’s, University of London, by Figshare. We want as many people as possible to be able to use this website. For example, that means you should be able to:
- change colours, contrast levels and fonts
- 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 (including the most recent versions of JAWS, NVDA and VoiceOver)
We’ve also made the website text as simple as possible to understand. The website contains images, downloadable documents in Word/PDF formats, audio and video files. The PDFs are best viewed in the free Adobe Reader tool, allowing you to magnify, navigate via the bookmark bar, change colours via preferences and listen using Adobe’s inbuilt text to speech or any other 3rd party tool.
Customising the website
AbilityNet has advice on making your device easier to use if you have a disability. You can access this advice by visiting their website here.
How accessible is this website?
We know some parts of this website are not fully accessible:
- Some user-generated files and previews of said files may be inaccessible
- Access-restricted parts of this website
- Most older image resources (e.g. charts, graphs, x-rays, blood results etc) do not have text alternative.
- Most older PDF documents that contain images do not have text alternative.
- Most older PDF documents that contain images are not fully accessible to screen reader software.
What to do if you cannot access parts of the Figshare website
We are always looking to improve the accessibility of the Figshare website. If you need information on parts of the Figshare website or resources in a different format like accessible PDF, large print or need subtitles for videos etc, please contact disability@sgul.ac.uk and we will endeavour to respond to you within 5 working days outside of our scheduled University closure days.
Reporting accessibility problems with this website
Reporting your experience will help us further enhance the accessibility of our Figshare website.
We continue to work with the owners of Figshare in making further improvements and enhancements to their accessibility features based on feedback from our users.
Please let us know if you encounter any problems, or if you find any of our features particularly useful. If you find any problems that are not listed on this page or think we are not meeting accessibility requirements, contact disability@sgul.ac.uk
When contacting us, please provide:
- Page URL (web page address)
- Issue encountered (and if on mobile or desktop)
- Any particular software or assistive technology being used (for example browser, screen reader)
If you need any help in reporting your difficulty with the website, please read the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) guide 'Contacting Organisations about Inaccessible Websites'.
Contacting organisations about inaccessible websites
There is additional government advice on contacting websites to report accessibility issues and what your rights are.
Reporting an accessibility problem on a public sector website
Enforcement procedure
If you are not happy with how we respond to your complaint, contact the Equality Advisory and Support Service (EASS).
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’).
Technical information about this website’s accessibility
St George’s, University of London is committed to making all websites hosted at the University accessible, in accordance with the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018.
Compliance status
This Figshare website is partially compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 AA standard, due to the non-compliances listed below.
The full guidelines are available at:
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1
Non accessible content
The content listed below is non-accessible for the following reasons.
PDFs and other documents
This website has many PDF and Word documents that do not meet accessibility standards - for example, they may not be accessible to a screen reader, have alternate text content and work well with text to speech especially when they are images. Some of them may have colour contrast issues. The following WCAG2.1 success criteria are not satisfied:
- 1.1.1(non-text content)
- 1.4.3(contrast – minimum)
- 1.4.5 (images of text)
- 4.1.2(name, role value)
All new documents uploaded from September 2020 will be tested for its accessibility using appropriate tools provided by Microsoft and Adobe, before being uploaded to the website.
Non-text content
This website has a number of images that do not provide text alternative (WCAG 2.1 success criterion 1.1.1 (non-text content)). Any new images published from September 2020 will be provided with text alternatives and be tested for accessibility standards wherever possible.
Link descriptions
Some of the hyperlinks in web pages may not be logical (for example, ‘click here’, WCAG2.1 success criterion 2.4.4(link purpose – in context)), and these will be fixed in all relevant web pages moving forward from September 2020. Before publishing new content, we will make sure that link text meets accessibility standards.
Colour-contrast of images
There may not be sufficient contrast between foreground and background colours (WCAG2.1 success criterion 1.4.1(use of colour)) for some images on this website. All such images will be tested for accessibility and if there are concepts or information conveyed using colours, these will be ensured to have an alternate way for communication.
How we tested this website
This statement was prepared on 20th September 2020. It was last reviewed on 20th September 2020.
This website was last tested on 20th September 2020. The test was carried out by internal teams.
We tested the whole public area of the platform along with the external widgets.
What we are doing to improve accessibility
Figshare is working towards full accessibility on privately-accessible pages and a major revision of this area is the key development focus for 2021. For further details, please email support@figshare.com.