Accessibility

Great Ormond Street Hospital is committed to providing a website that is accessible to the widest possible audience. We actively work to ensure that our website is accessible and usable by people of all abilities.

Accessibility guidelines

Web standards and technologies

Keyboard accessibility

 Microsoft Windows users can enable the accessibility feature to move the mouse using their arrow keys by following the below steps.

1. Click Start, Control Panel.
2. Within the Control Panel open Accessibility Options or Ease of Access
3. Click the "Change how your mouse works".
4. Check the "Turn on Mouse Keys" check box.
5. If you wish to increase the speed or change any other settings, click on the Settings button.
6. Click Apply and then close out of the box.

After performing the above steps you will be able to used the numeric keypad as a mouse moving up, down, left, right, and all the diagonals. In addition, you may also use the center "5" key as a left click.

Note: You must have the Number lock on for this feature to work by default. 

• 8 is mouse-up
• 4 mouse-left
• 6 mouse-right 
• 5 mouse down
• Keys 1,2 and 3 double up as Left-Click, Right-Click and Scroll-Click. 
• 7 and 9 are used to scroll up and down

Known issues

At the time of writing there are a number of known issues on the Great Ormond Street Hospital website. We will be working to resolve these over the coming months. Each of these issues has been identified below along with an estimation of when we hope to have resolved each issue.

• Images do not always have appropriate alternative text. All images added from January 2012 will adhere to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines;
• The HTML mark up generated by our CMS is not always semantically appropriate. We are committed to working with our CMS vendor to address the issue;
• Some of the images in use on the website (particularly graphs and charts) rely on perception of colour alone to be understood. We constantly review our pages and endeavour to rectify any instances of graphs or images not being accessible;
• Some of the text on the website does not meet the minimum required contrast ratio for double A level accessibility. We have implemented a style switcher with a high contrast theme which resolves the issue;
• Some of the images on the website contain text that may not be accessible to people using assistive technologies such as screen readers. We aim to provide this information in alternative formats (wherever possible);
• Groups of links have not always been marked up as list items. This can make it harder for people who use assistive technologies to skip over large blocks of links easily. We advise turning on "Mouse Keys" to assist with this, information on this can be found above;
• Some of the text used for links on the website is not sufficiently descriptive. From January 2012 we have used descriptive link text and work is ongoing to ensure that all links are suitably descriptive;
• Some of the form fields on the website have not been correctly associated with their form labels. This can make it harder for people who use assistive technologies such as screen readers to identify the purpose of the form fields. We are committed to working with our CMS vendor to address the issue;
• The human language of the pages (and subsections of some pages) on the website have not always been identified appropriately.  This is likely to affect multi-lingual people who use assistive technologies such as screen readers.  We are committed to working with our CMS vendor to address the issue;

Conformance date

This accessibility statement was issued on 7th January 2013.

Contact information

We are continually working to maintain the accessibility of this website. If you experience any problem accessing the site then please contact us.