Making our online content accessible means making sure it can be used by all of our customers. This includes customers with an impairment or disability

• impaired vision
• motor difficulties
• cognitive impairments or learning disabilities
• deafness or impaired hearing

But more broadly, ensuring our online materials are inclusive for customers who access our services in diverse ways such as

• international students using translation tools
• commuter students accessing our website or app on mobile devices
• customers with caring responsibilities, watching our videos without audio. 

At least 1 in 5 people in the UK have a long term illness, impairment or disability. Accessibility means making our content and design clear and simple enough so that most people can use it without needing to adapt it, while supporting those who do need to adapt things.

For example, someone with impaired vision might use a screen reader (software that lets a user navigate a website and ‘read out’ the content), braille display or screen magnifier. Or someone with motor difficulties might use a special mouse, speech recognition software or on-screen keyboard emulator.

Ensuring that we provide an equitable experience for our customers is everyone's responsibility. Whether you are editing Library Help FAQs, creating marketing materials, developing teaching or editing online content, it is your responsibility to do it with accessibility in mind. Making materials accessible becomes so much easier when it becomes part of your design thinking. If we can build accessible materials from the start. 

The do's and don'ts document developed by LTDS, is one of the most valuable quickstart guides and we would encourage everyone to use it as a checklist to refer to when creating anything.