UKMi Accessibility statement
This website is primarily aimed at NHS staff working in Medicines Information Services around the UK.
This accessibility statement is for the UKMi website (ukmi.nhs.uk) only. It does not cover any websites linked from this one. Those sites will have their own accessibility statements.
On this website, you should be able to:
- Zoom in up to 300% with text staying visible on the screen, and most images scaling without resolution loss
- Navigate most of the website using a keyboard
- Navigate most of the website using speech recognition software
- Read most of the website using a screen reader, including the latest versions of JAWS, NVDA, and VoiceOver
- Read most of the website on devices without a screen, like a braille computer
- Use the website even if Javascript is switched off
Some of our content is technical, and we use technical terms where there is no easier wording we could use without changing what the text means.
If you have a disability then AbilityNet has advice to help you make your device easier to use.
How accessible this website is
The majority of this website is fully accessible, and we run regulary audits to identify any new problems.
We know that some parts of the website aren't fully accessible:
we have a large number of old publication documents which are in PDF format, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Powerpoint.
How to get information in an accessible format
If you have problems accessing information on this website, or would like any of our work in a different format like a more accessible PDF, large print, easy read, audio recording, or braille:
email: medicines.info@uhl-tr.nhs.uk
We'll consider your request, and aim to get back to you within 3 days.
Enforcement procedure
The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) is responsible for enforcing 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 this website's accessibility
The National Medicines Information Service is committed to making its website accessible, in accordance with the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018.
This website is partially compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1 AA standard, due to the non-compliances listed below.
Where complying with the regulations would be a disproportionate burden, we conduct assessments and publish them on our disproportionate burden register.
Issues with technology
The vast majority of our website works correctly on any web technology.
For security reasons, we only support TLS 1.2 and higher security protocols, and this means that some older browsers will not show the site.
How our site looks and work is based on HTML5, and we test for and support the following browsers:
- Google Chrome
- Mozilla Firefox
- Microsoft Edge
- Apple Safari
- We also test in the Lynx browser emulator to ensure that the site renders correctly for non-screen users.
You may experience unexpected behaviour in other browsers, although we use fully validated code which should work on any modern (HTML5) browser.
Internet Explorer no longer supported as this browser is now at the end of its lifecycle.
Issues with links
We are aware of the following issues within the links on our site:
- Some link text doesn't make sense when read on its own (for example 'click here')
- On some pages there are multiple links with the same link text but different destinations on one page
- Many older PDF files contain broken links which do not resolve - we do not intend to resolve these as it is a disproportionate burden for files which are no longer in active use.
Issues with PDFs and other documents
PDFs are not able to comply with the requirements of the web accessibility standard, and we do not generally upload new PDFs. Where we do create new PDFs, we use the PDF/A standard which is more accessible is possible.
Our site contains a large number of PDFs created in previous years, especially in our ukmi conference publications.
Where these are no longer being updated, we do not intend to recreate them in accessible versions as this would be a disproportionate burden. The accessibility regulations don’t require us to fix PDFs or other documents published before 23 September 2018 if they’re not essential to providing our services.
How we test this website
This website undergoes automated testing against the W3C WAI Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1 using the automated tool when changes are made. This tool scans 100% of our web pages, and tests against all the criteria in the guidelines which are possible to automate.
The report is reviewed by the website development team, with any actions taken and prioritised into our future work. We aim to fix all high priority issues with one week of them being identified.
In addition, we conduct internal testing against known accessibility issues which are not able to be found through automated testing, on a sampled basis. We last conducted an accessibility check on these areas in December 2020.
Automated testing can't find everything that could be improved, but is rarely wrong about what it does find.
This means we have fixed tens of thousands of accessibility problems which manual checking would have missed.
We do also undertake manual testing. We follow best practice across the industry, and try to keep up with the latest techniques for making our site accessible.
Reporting accessibility problems
We're always looking to improve the accessibility of the website.
If you find any problems which aren't listed on this page, or think that we're not meeting the requirements of the accessibility regulations then please email ukmi@innottinghamwebdesign.co.uk to let us know.