Accessibility guide

Manage your preferences

The Leeds Beckett website is designed to enable you to manage your own privacy preferences. By clicking on 'Cookies' below you can manage what data the site collects about your browsing. This will only maintain if you are on your own device or using a synched version of your chosen browser. If you are using a shared or public machine without synching your browser then there is no need to change the preferences.

Our site is built with accessibility in mind and we seek to adhere to the WACG AA levels of compliance for digital accessibility. To support that we have provided instructions on managing animations below.

Cookies

Necessary Cookies
Necessary cookies enable you to use all the different parts of leedsbeckett.ac.uk. Without them services that you have asked for cannot be provided. Necessary cookies can only be disabled by changing your browser preferences.
Analytical Cookies
Analytical cookies help us understand how people are using our websites, so we can improve them and provide a better user experience. We also sometimes get our approved partner companies to analyse how people are using Leeds Beckett Websites and they may set their own analytical cookies in order to do this.
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For more information please view our Privacy Policy

Animations & Interaction

The Leeds Beckett University website occasionally uses animations to page elements and animated gifs to add impact to pages. If you wish to stop them from playing for accessibility purposes or for personal preference then please see the guidance below. Please note that browsers sometimes change how they operate, so please refer to your browser help files to find their latest information.
How do I turn off animations?

Chrome

Chrome users will need to use browser extensions. Animation Policy from Google will help you set your own preferences.

Microsoft Edge

There is currently no way to disable animations within Microsoft Edge. Users of Edge (Chromium) browser can install the Chrome extensions above and use them.

Internet Explorer

To stop animations on a single page you can just press the 'Esc' key. This will stop the animation on that page. If you wish to restart the animations you need to refresh the page. To permanently disable the playing of animated GIF images, open Internet Options > Advanced tab. Under the Multimedia section, uncheck the Play animations in webpage check-box, click Apply and Exit and then restart your computer.

Firefox

Type about:config in Firefox address bar and hit Enter to open Settings. Search for the image.animation_mode flag and change its value from Normal to None. Once you restart Firefox this will disable animations.

Web accessibility allows everyone, including people with disabilities, to perceive, understand, navigate and interact with our content.

Our aim, as an inclusive institution, is to achieve and maintain a minimum of AA compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, known as WCAG 2.1. These guidelines are an internationally recognised set of recommendations that explain how to make digital services, websites and apps accessible to everyone.

There are 14.1 million disabled people in the UK*

It's important when we create our content, in any form, that we consider all of our users and how they may need or choose to interact with us.

*Family Resources Survey (2019 to 20)

What we should consider as content creators:

Vision

Includes those that are severely sight impaired (blind), sight impaired (partially sighted) or colour-blind people.

Also consider situational barriers – if I'm outside using a mobile device I may have a problem viewing content on my screen.

Audio communications can help here.
Hearing

Includes people who are deaf or hard of hearing.

Also consider situational barriers – if I am on a train without my headphones, it’s unlikely I can consume video content.

Written alternatives can help here.
Mobility

Includes those who find it difficult to use a mouse or keyboard.
Thinking and understanding

Includes people with dyslexia, autism or learning difficulties.

The guidelines on this page are based around the four design principles for ultimate accessibility. These principles emphasise the need to think about the different ways in which our diverse audiences interact with our content.

Accessibility guidelines in action - we must make sure our content is:

Perceivable
We need to make sure users can recognise and use our website with the senses available to them.

In this section of the guide you'll find information about working with:
- Images
- Titles, headers and page structure
- Video and audio
- Colour and contrast
Perceivable content guide
Operable
We need to make sure our users can find, navigate and use our content, regardless of how they choose to access it.

In this section of the guide you'll find information about:
- Navigation and page structure
- Calls to action - links and buttons
Operable content guide
Understandable
We need to make sure our users can understand our content and our messages.

In this section of the guide you'll find information about:
- Keeping it simple
- Sentences and paragraphs
- Acronyms and abbreviations
Understandable content guide
Robust

We need to make sure our content can be interpreted reliably by a wide variety of user agents (including reasonably outdated, current and anticipated browsers and assistive technologies).

This principle is only relevant to our university's central digital team’s work but you can find out more at Gov.UK.

Digital team

Get in touch if you are a digital content creator and need some additional support with writing for the web or publishing content to our content management system, Sitecore.