Accessibility

The University of Surrey is committed to making the information and resources on its website accessible to all users. We aim to follow internationally accepted web standards that give members of the public and members of the University community full access to information on our site. 

The Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) has produced guidelines for making web content accessible. 

If you have any difficulty in accessing the content of this site, please contact the Web Support team and we will provide assistance: web-support@surrey.ac.uk.

Accessibility statement

This accessibility statement applies to the University of Surrey's main external website, www.surrey.ac.uk. 

This website is run by the University of Surrey. 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’re making the website text as simple as possible to understand, though we understand there is always more work that can be done to improve this. Our digital content team checks the readability score of pages when reviewing site sections and works with content owners to improve the readability score. 

If you have a disability, AbilityNet has advice on making your device easier to use. 

Compliance status

This website is partially compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1 AA standard, due to the non-compliances and exemptions below.

Non-accessible content

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

What we’re doing to improve accessibility

We are working to fix the issue of non-descriptive links, but as this is something that will need to be done by content editors checking and reviewing the many thousands of pages on the site, this work will take at least until the end of 2024. 

The Digital Content team will be educating content editors and owners on accessibility compliance where their actions can cause non-compliance.  

We are working with content owners to ensure video content that is not yet properly captioned (or has an audio description) is either updated with captions or removed from the site. This work will be ongoing until the end of 2024. 

We are working with content owners to ensure PDFs that are not yet accessible are properly marked up or made into accessible web pages. However, due to the large number of PDFs on our website, we will begin by ensuring our most-viewed PDFs essential to providing our services are accessible. This work will be ongoing until the end of 2024. We will then continue to work on making the remaining PDFs that fall within the scope of the accessibility regulations, accessible.

We are in the process of developing an improved internal system to identify and resolve accessibility issues as and when found rather than retrospectively. We are aiming to have this in place by the end of 2024

Preparation of this accessibility statement

This statement was first prepared on 21 September 2020. It was last reviewed on 17 May 2024. 

This website was tested in July 2020. The test was carried out by the Digital Accessibility Centre.  

The pages tested were chosen to test as full a range of CMS components and content types as possible. 

With most issues identified in the report now resolved, we sought a retest from the Digital Accessibility Centre in May 2022 to validate the fixes. We also completed a partial review utilising Monsido in late 2023.