Our Aims

In order to ensure all of our visitors can use our website these pages aim to meet Level-AA standard of WCAG 2.1. This includes elements such as:

  • Alternative text for all images and providing non-visual alternatives where appropriate
  • All essential audio-visual information is captioned, described as necessary or provided in alternative formats
  • Pages can be navigated with just a keyboard or speech recognition tools
  • The website can be used with a screen reader
  • Content is structured, ordered and labelled appropriately

Making changes to your device or system

AbilityNet has advice on making your devices easier to use if you have a disability. In addition, major operating systems produce the following guidance:

Feedback and Contact Information

If you need information on this website in a different format, or wish to report a problem not listed on this page, please contact the ISARIC digital team:

Email: info@isaric.org

We will consider your request and respond within 14 days.

Enforcement procedure

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) is responsible for enforcing the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018 (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

This website is partially compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1 AA standard. Partial compliance is due to the non-compliance listed in the Known issues section and exemptions noted in the Disproportionate burden section.

Accessibility Known Issues

We are aware of the following issues:

  • Many images do not have a text alternative (WCAG 2.1 1.1.1)
  • Many videos and live webinars and workshops are not captioned (WCAG 2.1 1.2.2)
  • On some pages heading levels are skipped (WCAG 2.1 2.4.10)
  • Forms have no option to review before submitting (WCAG 2.1 3.3.4)
  • Some iframe or embedded content cannot be navigated with keyboard and is skipped (WAG 2.1 2.1.1)
  • There are many redundant links (WCAG 2.1 2.4.4)
  • Search box does not have a label (WCAG 2.1 2.4.6)
  • Many of the documents (Word, PowerPoint and PDF etc.) on this website do not meet accessibility standards (WCAG 2.1 4.1.2)

Disproportionate burden

Content contributed by our collaborators via their own spaces on this site or submissions via our user base may not have always met the required accessibility standards. This combined with the scale of this legacy site means we cannot apply updates to all existing legacy content. We will therefore take a pragmatic approach in making all new content as accessible as possible, whilst focusing our efforts on updating page templates and contributor guidance to ensure a better standard of accessibility going forward. Legacy content is preserved as a useful record and archive to help guide future research projects. We may where possible update this legacy content on a case-by-case basis.

Documents that are essential to the service we provide will either be converted to HTML pages or replaced with accessible versions by September 2021.

Content that’s not within the scope of accessibility regulations

Third-party content and platforms

Our site includes third party content and functionality. This may direct you to a related service, link to another site or supporting documentation. We are not responsible for the accessibility of third-party content or to other sites we link to.

This includes but is not exclusive to:

  • YouTube videos
  • Other video hosting services such as Vimeo
  • Google maps
  • Webinars and virtual workshops hosted on web conferencing applications and online providers
  • Venngage infographics
  • D3 visualisations
  • Network mapping
  • JISC Survey forms and other online survey tools
  • Shiny Apps
  • PDF viewers including Yumpu
  • RSS aggregators
  • Social media

We will endeavour to make content we supply and control on third party platforms meet accessibility requirements; however, we are not responsible for the accessibility of the platform itself.

PDFs and other documents

The accessibility regulations do not require us to fix PDFs or other documents published before 23 September 2018 if they are not essential to providing our services such as an explanatory document on how to sign up to the network.

However, we will aim to ensure any new documents we publish are accessible.

Video and audio content

This site has pre-recorded audio and video content that was published before 23 September 2020, which is exempt from the accessibility regulations.

Archived content

This site contains archived content, which is exempt from the accessibility regulations published before 23 September 2020.