Digital Accessibility

An engineering education is no use to anyone it locks out. We are working towards WCAG 2.1 Level AA across this website and the learning platform behind it, and we treat an accessibility barrier as a defect in the product rather than an optional extra.

• Semantic headings and landmarks, so screen readers can navigate a page by structure.
• Text alternatives for meaningful images, and decorative images hidden from assistive tech.
• Form fields with real labels, and errors announced rather than shown by colour alone.
• Layouts that reflow to a phone screen and survive text being enlarged.
• Motion effects that switch themselves off when your system asks for reduced motion.

Every interactive control on the site can be reached and operated from the keyboard, and focus is visible as it moves. Dialogs — like the sign-up details prompt and the mobile menu — hold focus while open and close on Escape. We test with the screen readers our students actually use.

Body text and interface controls are checked against the WCAG AA contrast thresholds. We do not rely on colour by itself to carry meaning — status messages pair colour with an icon and words, so nothing is lost if you cannot distinguish the shades.

We are honest about the gaps. Some older course material and uploaded documents predate this standard and are being revised; video captions are added as courses are re-recorded rather than all at once; and embedded third-party content follows its provider's accessibility, not ours. If one of these is blocking you today, contact us and we will get you the material in a usable form.

If any part of this platform is hard or impossible for you to use, write to us with the page address, what you were trying to do, and the browser and assistive technology you use. We aim to reply within five working days, and we will tell you what we can fix and by when — and offer an alternative route in the meantime.