What are we doing at City?

City, University of London is starting to produce accessibility statements for its websites as required by the UK Government regulations. You can find links to these statements on this blog site, and also in some cases, linked from the actual website itself.

City’s website, www.city.ac.uk has an accessibility statement that is accessed from the foot of each of its pages, with separate statements for both the Student Hub website,  Staff Hub website and Library website also linked from their footers. Our Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), Moodle, has a  Moodle Accessibility Statement which is accessed from this blog.

What is City Doing to Improve Digital Accessibility for Academic Year 2022 – 2023

1. The University has a Digital Accessibility Working Group, established February 2020 focusing on improving accessibility of digital content and systems. Membership ranges across the schools, staff and student groups and professional services.
2. The University has invested in a three-year project to provide expertise, tools, and consultancy in order to audit, improve and develop maturity in Digital Accessibility in the University.
3. There is student representation and engagement in projects, co creation of resources, testing, and recommending tools and approaches for digitally accessible practice.
4. Training programmes and online guidance have been developed and released for all staff roles and students to ensure they are aware of the requirements and have the skills needed to create and update content
5. We have begun to review, write, document, and make available accessibility statements for all our digital systems.
6. A tracked support request has been set up on the University service platform for staff digital accessibility queries.
7. In our Online Learning Environment (Moodle), we enabled an instructor content accessibility reporting tool (Ally) on all our modules in July 2022.
8. In our Online Learning Environment (Moodle), we enabled a student automated format conversion tool (Ally) on all modules in July 2022.
9. We have an annually agreed caption correction approach for educational audio and video and a budget to support this activity.
10. We enabled automated captions and transcripts across all our educational multimedia platforms in 2022.
11. We have an Opt Out Lecture Recording Policy for face to face and online lectures from 2022.