Accessibility Statement

Last updated 25 April 2022

We want to make sure everyone is able to use our website (www.versusarthritis.org) and our online community (community.versusarthritis.org).

Versus Arthritis website and online community has been checked against WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standards and our sites are currently partially meeting these standards.

We are working to improve this currently, so you should now be able to:

  • zoom in up to 200% on the website and still be able to read all the text properly
  • change colours, contrast levels and fonts
  • navigate most of the website using just a keyboard
  • navigate most of the website using iOS voice control and speech recognition feature available on iOS 13 and above
  • listen to most of the website using a screen reader

Customise your experience

We have tried to ensure we are meeting your needs. However, you may wish to further customise the website to meet your needs. Individual adjustments to your desktop, laptop, tablet or mobile can make the website easier to use.

Customisable features include text size, colour contrasts and keyboard controls. Read AbilityNet’s My Computer My Way guide to find out more about how to do this.

Current accessibility work on our website, online community and app for young people

In 2021, we undertook accessibility audits on:

  • Versus Arthritis website
  • Arthritis Virtual Assistant (AVA)
  • Versus Arthritis online community
  • Arthritis Tracker App for young people

Our external specialists used automated testing tools and manual expert testing to look at the accessibility across our these websites and tools. We tested against the following environments:

  • Chrome 89 - JAWS (desktop screen reader)
  • Firefox 86 - NVDA (desktop screen reader)
  • Safari 13 - macOS VoiceOver (desktop screen reader) Safari 13- iOS VoiceOver (mobile screen reader)
  • Chrome 88 - TalkBack (mobile screen reader)
  • Windows Magnifier (screen magnifier)
  • Internet Explorer 11 – Dragon Naturally Speaking (speech recognition)

After testing across the website and our Arthritis Virtual Assistant, 65 issues relating to WCAG 2.1 A and AA were identified. After testing across our online community, 25 key issues were identified. 27 issues were identified on the app for young people.

Key issues included:

  • tabbing across all fields of a form unavailable using a keyboard
  • buttons on the site do not have accessible names to describe what the function is
  • clear and consistent heading structure is missing on some pages
  • appropriate and clear labelling of form fields are missing
  • navigation to skip to main or key content is missing

We are now working to fix all issues across our website, online community, and Arthritis Virtual Assistant (AVA) and app. We have fixed 50 issues across the website and AVA. We ran disabled user testing on our website and AVA to verify the experience with users.

In April 2021, we also ran readability user testing with five people to look at how easy our content was to understand and how to help more people access our information and support. We found:

  • The website performed well in terms of ease of understanding and informative content
  • Improvements will be made to use shorter sentences and paragraphs
  • We will be adding transliterations to some conditions and medicine names in the first instance

Third party functionality and external links

Sometimes on our website, we’ll use third party sites to perform certain tasks that we can’t do ourselves. Wherever possible we work with third parties to ensure that the service they provide achieves WCAG 2.1 Level AA. Versus Arthritis is not responsible for the content or accessibility issues of external sites and apps.

Improving accessibility in the future

We know we still have work to do and we’re looking to continue to improve our accessibility by:

  • Fixing known issues on our website, online community and app and retesting these issues to verify they are fixed.
  • Improving the accessibility of PDFs across the site
  • Training staff and volunteers on accessible content and development
  • Future disabled user testing on our app for young people and online community.

Known issues that we are unable to fix:

  • Appropriate alt text for the Google iframes used for the maps and locations within the 'In your Area' pages of the website
  • 400% zoom across some pop up modules on the website
  • iFrames on AVA cannot be bypassed

If you have problems using the Versus Arthritis site or a third part website or would like to be involved in helping us test our website in the future, please contact us.