College Websites

My intention is to run a full review in the near future of all the published Accessibility Statements on College and Service websites. On a provisional review, what has been a real surprise has been the high number of Accessibility Statements that are underdeveloped or are simply missing.

I am not certain which is worse, to be presented with an incomplete Accessibility Statement such as this example or this example on the right, or to instead be presented with nothing at all in 23% of all instances. To be presented with an empty page, to be presented with a 'Coming Soon' message, to be teased with a broken link, to be simply mis-sold, or, with the upmost irony, to be presented with restricted access is really, really bad.

For the second time in 2024, the Government Digital Service ran their own sample testing and found 14% (173 from 1,203) of Institutions did not have a published Accessibility Statement, which is actually 9% better than the 23% result of this comprehensive sectorwide assessment.

The irony is that this is a remedial qualitative assessment of a basic templated exercise (see right) to be undertaken by both Colleges that all boast dedicated Quality and Assessment managers, and by Services that are entirely funded by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, which, of course, has its own fully compliant Accessibility Statement.

Maybe there is a lack of knowledge, or capacity to undertake this simple bureaucratic project. Hopefully these links will enable the pass rate of this template assessment of the technical operations of the the Sector to be 100%. And if you feel that I am being too harsh, The Bible provides a very good justification for me being so:

James 3:1
Let not many of you become teachers, my brethren, knowing that as such we will incur a stricter judgment.

The Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018 came into force on 23rd September 2018 and are 'financed, for the most part, by the State, regional or local authorities, or by other bodies governed by public law'. It requires corporate websites to be 'perceivable, operable, understandable and robust'.

Institutions must 'perform an assessment of the extent to which compliance with the accessibility requirement imposes a disproportionate burden'.

Institutions must publish 'an accessibility statement in accordance with the model accessibility statement, and keep that statement under regular review'.

The Accessibility Statement must be 'provided in an accessible format and published on the website'.

The Accessibility Statement must include:

1. An explanation of those parts of the content that are not accessible and the reasons why, and
2. A link to a contact form which enables notification of an institution of any failure of its website to comply with the accessibility requirement, and
3. A link to the enforcement procedure to which recourse may be had in the event of an unsatisfactory response to the notification or the request.

A website is be presumed to be in conformity with the accessibility requirement to the extent that the website or mobile application conforms to Level A and AA Success Criteria as set out in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium.

The HTML Sample Accessibility Statement is straightforward to adopt and adapt and contains all of the sample wording and guidance on what to include in an Accessibility Statement.

It also very usefully provides a tickbox assessment criteria:

1. For websites, publish the statement as a normal HTML page.
2. Make sure it is linked to from a prominent place on the homepage or from every page on the website in a consistent place like the website footer.
3. Make sure it is in an accessible format that everyone can use.
4. Accessibility statement for [website names]
   Nota Bene This wording is legally required and must not be changed.
5. How accessible this website is
6. Feedback and contact information
7. Enforcement procedure
   Nota Bene This wording is legally required and must not be changed.
8. Technical information about this website’s accessibility Section
   Nota Bene This wording is legally required and must not be changed.
9. Compliance status
10. Non-accessible content Section
    Nota Bene If the website is fully compliant with the Accessibility Standard, then this Section should be left out.
11. Non-compliance with the accessibility regulations
12. Disproportionate burden
13. Content that is not within the scope of the accessibility regulations
14. What we are doing to improve accessibility
15. Preparation of this accessibility statement

Excellent examples of Accessibility Statements and 'Road Map' schedules of review and improvement or compliance completion tasks:

College and Service logos are rather important and often rather expensive to fully develop and design. Usefully, because of this, they also provide a straightforward yardstick for assessing each institution's technical sophistication.

Of the 431 instances accessed, only 3 meet in full the two primary assessment criteria. This was a surprise, but then again, a logo's file name and alt text are not significant to anyone that is unaware of basic digital operations.

Other College and Service logos meet my secondary assessment criteria of being attractive, technically sophisticated, and boldly big! Pride is admittedly a sin, but then commitment is not. Going big is an active design choice and by contrasting the many tiny and illegible logos, with their boldly resized versions at the bottom of this tab, I make the dozen or so boldly big logos look even better.

By why stop here at boldly big? Why not get creative? Maybe not a busy as BCMIoT's GIF but there are so many inspiringly and engagingly creative possibilities.

The impressive increase in the correct use of SVG and PNG files for graphic elements instead of JPEG files, now only 13 instances, is very gratifying. But this is not the only cause of poor graphical presentations.

Something very weird is causing these latter two high-resolution PNG files to present really badly. Do the managers of these two College's not know that this can and should be fixed? Interestingly, the SVG logo used by Sparsholt's sister College presents perfectly well:

The notable change is the substantial increase in the utilisation of SVG files. These are vector files, similar to PDFs and can, and should be, small sized files. The benefit of vector files is that they can be zoomed into and not loose definition which makes them sharp on all displays including the highest definition monitors.

It is interesting to note the rate of progress from the previous sectorwide survey from 2018. Half jokingly, at this rate there should be no more JPEGs incorrectly utilised as logo files by 2030.

I feel like I am punching downwards on this one, but then again, Colleges and Services are delegated with responsibility for teaching the rest of us about high quality graphic design.

• As seen in its social media channels Luton's Adult Learning Service does have a logo.
• The logo used by Croydon's Adult Learning Service, because it is such an anachronism, is almost passable, but this just me pulling my punches.
• Greenhead College even had a full brand refresh, but kept the italicised lowercase 'gc'! Look at the 'g' in the word 'College' and compare with the g in 'gc'! It is not the same font! These three are all 'exceptional', just not for good reasons.

There are graphic designers that will, for a wide variety of misinformed reasons, purposefully use very small fonts. That said, most if not all instances listed here are simply mistakenly resized and the original purpose of the design has not been given sufficient consideration and the impracticality of the decision not fully appreciated.

Sutton College's SVG logo is a great case in point. It is handsomely designed to be viewed with a minimum width of 300px, which is still nowhere near as the boldly big Luton Sixth Form College's logo, but instead is presented with a width of only 100px:

To slightly mitigate the situation for Sutton College, they are currently (11 September 2025) showing a banner which states that their 'new website is loading'. This new website will hopefully show their very handsome logo at the originally planned width, and have both an exactly literal file name and grammatically formatted Alt Text; an Accessibility Statement would be also be a nice to have.

Obviously, most of the instances of seriocomically small fonts, presented in 5pt/7px/0.4em, are the secondary strapline texts, such as 'Outstanding Education and Training', or completely illegible 'leading students to success', and my personal favourite, even if it does discontinue capitalising words halfway through, 'Creating Excellence Together through a culture of care'.

The one instance of the actual name of the College being presented in a seriocomically small 5.5pt font is 'BASINGSTOKE COLLEGE of TECHNOLOGY'. It does use uppercase characters at least, and the 'BCoT' abbreviation is at 12pt/16px/0.9em legible. For a College with such a great reputation for digital services, this and the use of a JPEG for a logo has been a real shock.

Enough of me putting the boot in, here are ten small logos that have all been bumped up to a reasonable height (200px) or width (340px). This is to show how great they look when they are presented in a manner that their designers intended. When they resized some of hidden details of the original design, both positive and negative aspects, are made visible:

• Positive: Milton Keynes College's logo utilises a handsome wire shadow effect.
• Negative: Longley Park Sixth Form College's utilises two fonts, one for the name and an other for the strapline, and
• Just Interesting: The two sister colleges, Solihull College and Stratford-upon-Avon College both utilise the same font in their logos.

The process of categorisation requires artificial characterisations. Most instances are clear and obvious but some are ill-defined or present in more than one category. This exercise in categorisation of the 431 FE/6F/AE corporate logos landed on six distinct characteristics and each is detailed in its own column; a Text Only category and 5 Hybrid subcategories. But please do feel free to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. if you see any that can be recategorised with a more developed characterisation.

Also feel free to circulate this report to colleagues in faculty that are teaching courses in graphic design, website operations, or enterprise to see if it would be useful as a learning resource.