Accessibility Statement for The Global Health Network (TGHN) Website (https://tghn.org)
(Version 2.1 - please see updates section for latest actions)
This statement applies to The Global Health Network’s website, this includes the online research tools and digital hubs for communities of practice hosted on the website; https://tghn.org.
The Global Health Network (“TGHN”) is a collaborative project involving research organisations from all over the world.
The website was established to achieve TGHN’s aim to facilitate collaboration and resource sharing for health research. The Global Health Network enables easier, faster, and better research in the world’s most challenging settings. The website operates as a network, hosting digital hubs for communities of practice that focus on specific therapeutic areas and research issues. This website is run by The Global Health Network team at the University of Oxford and includes content that is crowd-sourced or provided by collaborators.
The University of Oxford (the “University”) is currently acting as the coordinator for the site infrastructure, some digital hubs are coordinated by TGHN, others are coordinated by a TGHN collaborator. Here’s a list of all digital knowledge hubs hosted on TGHN. This accessibility statement has been updated in accordance to University guidance and based upon the European Union Web Accessibility Directive.
The Global Health Network and University of Oxford are committed to providing an accessible web presence that gives members of the public and our community full access to information offered publicly through the platform.
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:
How accessible this website is
We are aware that some parts of our website are not fully accessible. These include:
- Navigation focus
- Text alternative for images
- Contrast of hyperlinked text
- Text readability
- Video and audio captions
We are working to address areas where our accessibility needs improvement. Please see the known issues section for more details.
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 Global Health Network digital team:
Email: info@theglobalhealthnetwork.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
The Global Health Network and University of Oxford 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. 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
Following a basic accessibility audit conducted September 2020 we are aware of the following issues:
- Some pages do not have a language document set up (WCAG 2.1 3.1.1)
- Some pages do not have a background colour defined (WCAG 2.1 1.4.3
- Many images do not have a text alternative (WCAG 2.1 1.1.1)
- Some pages have text that is justified (WCAG 2.1 1.4.8)
- Hyperlink text font has a very low contrast (WCAG 2.1 1.4.3)
- Text size does not adjust to match browser settings and is too small in parts of the page (WCAG 2.1 1.4.4)
- Many videos and live webinars and workshops are not captioned (WCAG 2.1 1.2.2)
- On some pages font for heading levels are skipped (WCAG 2.1 2.4.10)
- Many pages include link text that cannot be understood out of context (WCAG 2.1 4.1.2)
- Forms have no option to review before submitting (WCAG 2.1 3.3.4)
- Website navigation focus has very low contrast (WCAG 2.1 1.4.3)
- Some pages have no navigation focus (WCAG 2.1 2.4.7)
- 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)
- Some pages have images that are not responsive on small screens (WCAG 2.1 1.3.4)
- Zooming on desktop and viewing on mobile carousel images do not resize (WCAG 2.1 1.3.4)
- 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
The Global Health Network has been providing high quality, free to access content in line with our mission of enabling easier, faster, and better research in the world’s most challenging settings since 2010. The network was established to allow both resources to be shared by the central team as well as by our collaborating partners. The site operates as a network, hosting digital knowledge hubs for communities of practice focusing on specific therapeutic areas and research issues. Some of the site’s services may provide you with settings to narrow the scope of use granted to the University. Collaborative workspaces provide an area on the site for users to selectively share contributions and develop collaborative projects.
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.
What we’re doing to improve accessibility
We want to provide the best experience possible for all our website visitors. To achieve this we will:
- Fix known issues
- Work with our developers to make new features of the website accessible
- Develop and provide guidance for content editors and coordinators on accessibility standards
- Carry out periodic accessibility checks
Update 2 August 2021
- The Global Health Nework Team have attended accessibility training for the web as provided by the University and third party accessibility advisors
- Some accessibility updates and changes have been implemented by internal web editors (including colour contrast, links, headings and improvements to video content)
- Training is planned for external editors (ie those editors who have responsibility for their specific knowledge hub)
- Resources to follow for external editors (including help guides for them to follow best practice)
- Web development to address website wide accessibility issues with coding will go through requirements gathering
Preparation of this accessibility statement
This statement was prepared on 17 September 2020.
This statement was updated 2 August 2021.
How we tested this website
This website was tested over a couple of days leading up to 11 September 2020. The test was carried out by The Global Health Network team using a carefully chosen sample of pages and content types.
The pages were checked using WebAim’s Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool and manually following the UK governments basic accessibility check guidelines and WCAG 2.1 Primer Checklist
We tested:
Global Research Nurses Home Page
EDCTP Knowledge Hub Protocol Development Toolkit
Epidemics Ethics Registration Page
Epidemics Ethics Resources Page
Intergrowth-21st Standards and Tools
Professional Development Scheme
The Global Health Training Centre Course
Lactahub e-book
Further auditing took place July 2021 for the following member hubs: