Updated September 2024 (information about website and training)
Next update due December 2024 (more about accessibility training and review)
Our aim
NRICH wants to encourage all learners to engage with and enjoy doing maths. A fundamental part of our approach is providing tasks that are easy to get started with, but can provide a challenge for students when they are ready. Learning works best when everyone can get started, and everyone can get profitably stuck. We’re focusing on accessibility at the moment, to try and ensure this approach is as inclusive as we can make it.
This page addresses the methodology and reasoning behind our efforts to make the NRICH website accessible.
What we are doing
In 2023 our website began a major rework, to modernise and improve the user experience. This work continues through 2024, and the website will conform to WCAG 2.1 accessibility guidelines at AAA level in the main.
These guidelines are explained in more detail here:
The new website is live now, and we have been addressing issues that arose from an accessibility audit in May 2024. We have another accessibility workshop coming up in November 2024 where we plan to review the success of these changes.
The challenges for us
There are some areas where we believe we will fall short of full compliance. We will prioritise the work that will have the greatest benefit, and apologise for what we are unable to do.
- NRICH recently celebrated its 25th year of bringing its resources to schools, and we have built up an enormous amount of resources over that time. It’s possible that we won’t be able to make all the elements of these resources fully accessible, so we will focus on those in the curriculum mapping documents and those which we know are used most frequently.
- We are quickly building up a large amount of video content (see NRICH Live, from webinars and presentations). While we will provide closed captions for these, there may be visual information in these videos which is not accessible and is not practically possible to transmit via captions.
- We have an ongoing programme of improvement for our interactive web apps. We are making efforts to make these as accessible as possible, including making use of high contrast text, avoiding visual cues which use colour only, and providing keyboard controls where it seems important. There are intrinsic difficulties with making this type of app fully accessible though, when the mechanics of the game largely depend on spatial layout or other visual information. Developing an accessible version of this type of app may require building a new app.
Testing and advice
To make sure our work is having the effect we want, we are carrying out testing on the new website and resources prior to releasing them. This began in July 2023 and is ongoing throughout 2024.
We have established a Teacher Panel, representing different settings and age groups, who visit our base at the Centre for Mathematical Sciences and offer online advice in between meetings as requested by our team. We asked the Panel to try using the new website in a prototype stage and their feedback helped inform its final design prior to launch in November 2023. The last meeting of the panel was in Spring 2024, and we plan another one soon.
We are also been asking for bids from external accessibility experts for these three key tasks; review our relaunched website; advise about the design of our resources; and, advise about ways to enhance the accessibility of our live events. We have now chosen a provider, and training with the team has started.
Get in touch with us
We are very interested in hearing about the experience of users with accessibility needs. For example, please let us know about any difficulties you have had with the site or the resources we offer, or resources that you would love to see us produce. Feel free to tell us about issues you have witnessed or heard about as well.
If you have a query or a comment, please contact us by email: enquiries.nrich@maths.org