Accessibility guidance
Leeds Museums & Galleries strives to be an inclusive service.
As part of Leeds City Council, Leeds Museums & Galleries must legally comply with The Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018.
Our website and any documents we post online, including PDF files, Microsoft Office documents and online flipbooks, must be screen-reader friendly by meeting an internationally recognised standard of web accessibility. Screen-reader software is a form of assistive technology that reads a screen’s display aloud to the user. It can be especially useful for people who have visual or motor impairments. View screen-reader software in action.
The accessibility standard our online content must meet is WCAG 2.1 level AA.
WCAG 2.1
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 covers a wide range of recommendations for making web content accessed through desktops, laptops, tablets, and mobile devices more accessible. Following these guidelines will make content more accessible to a wider range of people with disabilities, including accommodations for and combinations of:
- blindness and low vision
- deafness and hearing loss
- limited movement
- speech disabilities
- photosensitivity
The recommendations also provide some accommodation for learning disabilities and cognitive limitations, but will not address every user need for people with these disabilities. Following these guidelines will also often make web content more usable to users in general. Find out more about WCAG 2.1.
How we can meet the required standard
Creating new online documents and making existing online documents accessible
An accessible online document has an established reading order, as well as visual elements that are tagged with alternative text descriptions. For example, any visual element such as a photo, chart, or graph that is necessary for the understanding of the document must be tagged. The established reading order and alternative text descriptions are needed for assistive technology to comprehensively and accurately communicate the information to the reader.
Generally speaking, these are the options for making your document accessible:
- Put the information on the website (thereby converting it to web format/HTML) by contacting the Audience Development team at [email protected]
- Tag a PDF version of your document using Adobe Acrobat Pro*
- Create an accessible version of Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, or Excel files
Design requests made to external agencies
Requests made to external design agencies for material intended as a document download from our website or as a social media post, must stipulate that final designs and templates be compliant with modern web accessibility standards. This will mainly involve checking that headings are tagged, that there is a sufficient contrast ratio between coloured elements, and that alternative text descriptions for non-text elements such as images and charts are present.
Multimedia resources
All multimedia resources published online must be captioned. Captioned media displays the audio content of a program as text on-screen and synchronised with the dialogue of the speaker, and includes additional auditory information such as sound-effects. This provides accessibility for users who are deaf or hard-of-hearing, while also benefiting users with diverse learning abilities and whose primary language is not English.
Online flipbooks
Leeds Museums & Galleries are no longer posting PDF documents to Issuu.com because documents on this website cannot be read by assistive technology and therefore are not accessible.
There are digital publishers similar to Issuu that offer screen-reader friendly flipbooks. If you want to publish an online flipbook it is important to note that digital publishing can be very expensive and will likely only be worth the investment for a high-profile piece that will be viewed online extensively.
Further information
Work on ensuring that all of our online content is accessible is ongoing. You can read about the work carried out so far to ensure that museumsandgalleries.leeds.gov.uk is accessible to the required standard on its accessibility page.
If you need help, advice or training on any of the topics on this page, get in touch.
