Accessibility

This page is intended as a generic accessibility statement for EPrints and should be amended as required before deployment of your EPrints repository.

Table of Contents

• Accessibility statement for UGD Academic Repository
  • How accessible UGD Academic Repository is
  • What to do if you cannot access parts of UGD Academic Repository
  • Reporting accessibility problems with UGD Academic Repository
  • Enforcement procedure
• Technical information about UGD Academic Repository's accessibility
• Non accessible content
  • Non compliance with the accessibility regulations
  • Disproportionate burden
  • Content that is not within the scope of the accessibility regulations
• How we tested UGD Academic Repository
• What we’re doing to improve accessibility

Accessibility statement for UGD Academic Repository

UGD Academic Repository is run by UGD. We want as many people as possible to be able to use UGD Academic Repository. 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 have 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.

How accessible UGD Academic Repository is

We know some parts of UGD Academic Repository are not fully accessible:

• most older PDF documents are not fully accessible to screen reader software

What to do if you cannot access parts of UGD Academic Repository

If you need information on UGD Academic Repository in a different formats please contact our repository administrators. We will consider your request and will aim to get back to you within 7 working days.

Reporting accessibility problems with UGD Academic Repository

We are always looking to improve the accessibility of UGD Academic Repository. If you find any problems not listed on this page or think we are not meeting accessibility requirements, please contact us.

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).

Technical information about UGD Academic Repository's accessibility

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

UGD Academic Repository is not compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1 AA standard. The non-accessible sections are listed below.

Non accessible content

The content listed below is non-accessible for the following reasons.

We are always looking to improve the accessibility of UGD Academic Repository. If you find any problems not listed on this page or think we are not meeting accessibility requirements, contact by email: repository@ugd.edu.mk.

Non compliance with the accessibility regulations

We are yet to compile a list of where and how UGD Academic Repository is non-compliant with accessibility regulations.

Disproportionate burden

We are yet to compile a list of problems with fixing them would be a disproportionate burden.

Content that is not within the scope of the accessibility regulations

PDFs and other documents

As UGD Academic Repository is an open access research repository, the principal content made available to users are research outputs such as articles, papers, posters and reports, many of which are PDF documents. Many PDF documents, especially older ones, are not fully accessible to screen reader software and do not contain other common accessibility features. In particular:

• many documents, especially older ones, do not conform to the PDF/A archiving format.
• many lack bookmarks or document titles, therefore failing to meet WCAG 2.1 success criteria 2.4.5 and 2.4.2.
• many discuss scientific or scholarly concepts which may be abbreviated with no mechanism for discovering the meaning of the abbreviations, or unusual words arising from scholarly discourse without definitions. These issues each fail WCAG 2.1 criteria 3.1.4 and 3.1.1 respectively.
• there may be some documents that fail to specify their human language, thereby failing WCAG 2.1 success criterion 3.1.1.
• many documents may not reflow satisfactorily. This fails WCAG 2.1 success criterion 1.4.10.

The accessibility regulations do not require us to fix PDFs or other documents placed in UGD Academic Repository's archive before 23 September 2019 as these items are considered "archives".

PDFs and other documents added after 23 September 2019 may be user provided and therefore not fully accessible. UGD Academic Repository has a review process that should identify these before they are made available for download. If this is not the case please contact by email: repository@ugd.edu.mk.

General issues

Areas of UGD Academic Repository which are not document-based demonstrate good levels of accessibility. However, the following issues have been identified and are in the process of being addressed:

• Headings on some of our pages do not appear in a logical order. This does not meet WCAG 2.1 success criterion 2.4.10.
• Some of the forms and interactive search pages on UGD Academic Repository are not appropriately labelled or do not have labels. This does not meet WCAG 2.1 success criterion 3.3.2.
• Interactive elements of UGD Academic Repository (such as search) do not utilise status messages to update screen readers of a change in state. This does not meet WCAG 2.1 success criterion 3.2.2.

How we tested UGD Academic Repository

UGD Academic Repository was last comprehensively tested on 4 June 2020. You can read the comprehensive report.

Based on testing a default publication flavour installation of EPrints using standard test data, all tested public-facing pages currently report no errors, contrast errors or alerts except where this is essential for the functioning of EPrints as on Open Access repository (i.e. links to PDF documents) or due to duplications in the test data leading to alerts about shared alternative texts for nearby images. It should be noted that although Chromium's WAVE extension does not report any contrast errors for public-facing pages Firefox's does but the former was used for testing. Firefox's contrast errors are due to its default settings for the background colour of select boxes.

Many non-public administration pages do have significant numbers of errors or alerts. This will be addressed by the release of EPrints 3.4.3 if not EPrints 3.4.2. Typically where very large number of errors or alerts exist on a page, the majority are the same issue generated by a programmatic layout of information, (e.g. if one search result has an issue, the remainder of search results on that page are likely to have the same issue). This means it is likely only a small number of changes should be necessary to eliminate a significant number of these issues.

Miscellaneous pages like those for OAI metadata harvesting have been tested and found to have issues but are being considered low priority, as they are not generally intended for human use.

What we’re doing to improve accessibility

Our accessibility roadmap shows how and when we plan to improve accessibility on UGD Academic Repository.

This statement was first prepared on 2 December 2019. It was last updated on 20 December 2019.