Accessibility statement

Making this website work for you

This accessibility statement applies to https://www.nmc.org.uk.

This website is run by The Nursing and Midwifery Council. We want as many people as possible to be able to use this website. For example, that means you should be able to:

  • change colours, contrast levels and fonts
  • zoom in up to 300% without the text spilling off the screen
  • navigate most of the website using just a keyboard
  • navigate most of the website using speech recognition software
  • listen to most of the website using a screen reader (including the most recent versions of JAWS, NVDA and VoiceOver)
  • We’ve also made the website text as simple as possible to understand.

AbilityNet has advice on making your device easier to use if you have a disability.

How accessible this website is

We know some parts of this website are not fully accessible:

  • Some parts of our website are difficult to read when a user adjusts the text to 200% its current text size.
  • Some parts of our website are difficult to read when a user adjusts the text spacing, character spacing and line height.
  • Our PDF documents are not fully accessible to screen reader software.

Reporting accessibility problems with this website

We’re always looking to improve the accessibility of this website. If you find any problems not listed on this page or think we’re not meeting accessibility requirements, please contact us.

Please provide a brief summary of the problem you are facing and the webpage or service you are trying to access.

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, please contact the Equality Advisory and Support Service (EASS).

Contacting us by phone or visiting us in person

We provide a text relay service for people who are D/deaf, hearing impaired or have a speech impediment.

Our offices have audio induction loops, or if you contact us before your visit we can arrange a British Sign Language (BSL) interpreter.

Technical information about this website’s accessibility

The Nursing and Midwifery Council is committed to making its website accessible, in accordance with the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018.

Compliance status

This website is partially compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1 AA standard, due to the non-compliances listed below.

Non-accessible content

Non-compliance with the accessibility regulations

The content listed below is non-accessible for the following reasons.

Images
  1. Some images do not have a text alternative, so people using a screen reader cannot access the information. This does not meet WCAG 2.0 success criterion 1.1.1 Non-text Content.

    We plan to add text alternatives for all images by December 2021. When we publish new content we’ll make sure our use of images meets accessibility standards.
Text and links
  1. Some parts of our website are difficult to read when a user adjusts the text to 200% its current text size. Some text overlays other text and some becomes cut off. This can make it difficult for users with low vision or visual impairments who need to scale content in order to read it. This does not meet WCAG 2.0 success criterion 1.4.4 Resize Text.

  2. Some of our text links are not easy understood without further context. This can make navigating our website difficult for keyboard users where the purpose of a link is not clear. This does not meet WCAG 2.0 success criterion 2.4.4 Link Purpose.

Content that’s not within the scope of the accessibility regulations

PDFs and other documents

Some of our PDFs and Word documents are essential to providing our services. For example, we have PDFs with information on how users can access our services, and forms published as Word documents.

The accessibility regulations do not require us to fix PDFs or other documents published before 23 September 2018 if they’re not essential to providing our services.

Any new PDFs or Word documents we publish will meet accessibility standards.

What we’re doing to improve accessibility

Our accessibility roadmap below shows how and when we plan to improve accessibility on this website.

  • We’re constantly working to identify and improve accessibility issues on this website.
  • We’re currently carrying out further audits of our content and working with our website developers to fix the issues we identify.

Preparation of this accessibility statement

This statement was prepared on 21 September 2020. It was last reviewed on 22 September 2020.

This website was last tested in September 2020. The test was carried out by The Method Consulting company.

We selected a sample of webpages to test across the main page templates we use for the website.