The Royal College of Music is committed to ensuring as many people as possible can use this website.
This accessibility statement applies to https://www.rcm.ac.uk. Please note, this website is run by the Royal College of Music.
We want as many people as possible to be able to use this website. For example, that means you should be able to:
- change colours, contrast levels and fonts via browser
- zoom in up to 400% without the text spilling off the screen
- navigate most of the website using just a keyboard
- navigate most of the website using speech recognition software
- listen to most of the website using a screen reader (including the most recent versions of JAWS, NVDA and VoiceOver)
For more information on how to make your device easier to use if you have a disability, see this AbilityNet guide.
How accessible this website is
We are working to improve the accessibility of our website, but we know that some areas are not fully accessible. In particular, we know that you may encounter the following issues:
- some PDFs published before January 2023 are not fully accessible to screen reader software
- you cannot skip to the main content when using a screen reader
- some parts of the ticketing journey do not show visible keyboard focus
Feedback and contact information
We’re always looking to improve the accessibility of this website.
If you find any problems not listed on this page or if you need information on this website in a different format such as large print please contact us using the details below:
Enforcement procedure
The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) is responsible for enforcing the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018 (the ‘accessibility regulations’). If you’re not happy with how we respond to your complaint, contact the contact the Equality Advisory and Support Service (EASS).
Contacting us by phone or visiting us in person
You can get in touch with us by phone, email, or in-person. We have an audio induction loop at the RCM Museum.
Read more about accessibility at RCM
Technical information about this website’s accessibility
Royal College of Music is committed to making its website accessible, in accordance with the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018.
Compliance status
This website is partially compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1 AA standard, due to the non-compliances and exemptions listed below.
Non-accessible content
The content listed below is non-accessible for the following reasons.
Non-compliance with the accessibility regulations
Reflow and magnification
Some website functionality does not work when using browser magnification at 200%. This doesn’t meet WCAG success criterion 1.4.10 (reflow).
We plan to resolve this by May 2024.
Resize text
Some content becomes obscured and features do not work correctly when font size is increased by 200%. This doesn’t meet WCAG 2.1 success criteria 1.4.4 (resize text).
We plan to resolve this by May 2024.
Disproportionate burden
Ticketing
Our ticketing platform is not WCAG 2.1 compliant. Some users may have difficulty selecting dates and choosing seats when booking tickets using assistive technologies.
We use Spektrix as our ticketing and CRM system. Read the accessibility statement on Spektrix iFrames for further information.
We’ve spoken to Spektrix about their plans to improve the accessibility of their platform. We’ve also assessed the cost and feasibility of switching ticketing systems or implementing a custom ticketing website.
We believe that doing so now would be a disproportionate burden within the meaning of the accessibility regulations. We expect this to be the case until Spring 2024, after which accessibility improvements will have been made.
Content that’s not within the scope of the accessibility regulations
PDFs and other documents
Some of our PDFs and Word documents are essential to providing our services. We are in the process of fixing these or replace them with accessible word documents or HTML pages.
The accessibility regulations do not require us to fix PDFs or other documents published before 23 September 2018 if they’re not essential to providing our services.
Any new PDFs or Word documents we publish will meet accessibility standards.
What we’re doing to improve accessibility
We are committed to providing a website that is accessible to all, ensuring any new web components take an accessibility first approach, but it will take some time due to the scale and complexity of the task.
We are also:
- rolling out accessibility training to staff who create web content
- raising general awareness about accessibility across the organisation
- investigating how we can fix and improve our PDFs and videos
Preparation of this accessibility statement
This statement was prepared on 10 January 2023. It was last reviewed on 18 August 2023.
The last assessment of this website was conducted in August 2023. We aim to audit our site on an annual basis.
We used a combination of automated and manual assessment to review the accessibility of our website. We scan all pages using Sortsite from Powermapper and manually assess a representative sample of pages from our website ensuring all page types and user interface elements have been assessed.
