Explore Accessibility

Website Accessibility

The Royal Academy of Music is committed to making its website accessible, in accordance with the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018.

This website is mostly compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1 AA standard, and work is in progress to make the site fully complaint.

Please note, our accessibility statement applies only to the Royal Academy of Music website under the domain https://ram.ac.uk.

What has been addressed

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

  • zoom in up to 400% without the text spilling off the screen
  • adjust line height and word spacing using tools like Text Spacing Bookmarklet
  • navigate most of the website using just a keyboard
  • navigate efficiently through the site using HTML landmarks such as breadcrumb trails, consistent menus or the search features
  • navigate long pages by headings/subheadings using assistive technology tools or plugins
  • listen to most of the website using assistive technologies – for example text to speech tools and plugins, screen readers, and inbuilt phone and/or tablet functionality

We have also made the website text as simple as possible to understand.

What we are working on

We know some parts of this website are not yet fully accessible and are in the process of working through these issues:

  • captions and audio descriptions on live videos and audio descriptions on pre-recorded videos via the Academy’s website, YouTube and Vimeo channels are not provided because the cost of doing so places a disproportionate burden on the Academy, and would significantly impede performance opportunities for students.
  • older (and some newer) PDF documents still have accessibility problems -see below for more details about documents
  • a few of our older videos do not have captions
  • we are still writing transcripts for our videos
  • we are testing our online forms to assess how you can navigate using just a keyboard

Issues with PDFs and other documents

The Academy website (ram.ac.uk) contains many documents dating back several years. Many of our older PDFs and Word documents do not meet accessibility standards – for example, they may not be marked up so they’re accessible to a screen reader, they may not work well with text to speech, they may not reflow when magnified and they may not be navigable by headings in the bookmark panel. Some may have colour contrast issues.

We are addressing these issues in the following ways:

  • All new documents uploaded from September 2020 will be tested for accessibility using the appropriate tools provided by Microsoft and Adobe, for example, before being uploaded to the website.
  • The accessibility regulations do not require us to fix PDFs or other documents published before 23 September 2018 if they are not essential to providing our services. We will consider this as we review and work to update all our content and will make every effort to replace existing documents with accessible versions where possible.
  • We also know that some of the link text to our documents does not make sense when read on its own (for example, ‘click here’). We plan to fix the existing links by January 2021.

How we test

ram.ac.uk was built in 2020 and has had several rounds of accessibility testing throughout the build. The site was tested by navigating the site with Voice Over and keyboard. All testing was done on the Chrome browser. We will soon list any outstanding issues by our website agency, Whitespace ltd, once the site has been tested again post launch, please check back here soon. We are taking an agile approach to the ongoing development of our website and as such, these issues will be identified and fixed through continuous updates.

User testing

The Academy had planned to run targeted user testing sessions in person, with students who have a disability, to further assess how we can improve the accessibility of our website. However, the COVID-19 Pandemic meant we had to cancel these sessions and we are now looking at running the sessions online during Autumn 2020.

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 are not happy with how we respond to any issues you raise, please contact the Equality Advisory and Support Service (EASS).

If you need information on this website in a different format please contact us on:

Email: web.accessibility@ram.ac.uk

What to do if you cannot access parts of this website and contact details

We are always looking to improve the accessibility of this website. If you find any problems that are not listed on this page or think we’re not meeting accessibility requirements, please contact us on:

Email: web.accessibility@ram.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)

We will aim to respond as quickly as possible and, if applicable, add a fix to our website bug fix schedule.

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 are not happy with how we respond to any issues you raise, please contact the Equality Advisory and Support Service (EASS).

This statement was written in July 2020 and is regularly updated.