Website accessibility statement

The Victoria and Albert Museum is committed to providing an accessible website. This statement describes what we have already done to make our website accessible, what we intend to do to improve its accessibility and how we plan to maintain these standards.

Scope of this statement

• this statement refers to the new V&A South Kensington website launched in May 2011:
  www.vam.ac.uk
• the statement was last updated in May 2011
• this statement does not apply to old exhibition microsites or other miscellaneous pages not yet converted into the new design. We are making accessible as much of this content as possible, by transferring it into the new website.  We will not redevelop all non-standard interactive features on old exhibition microsites, but will transfer these as useful features even if we are unable to make them fully accessible. Future exhibition content will be accessible within the new site.
• there is a separate accessibility statement for the V&A Museum of Childhood website

Standards compliance

• we support the use of web accessibility standards. Our approach is is to meet as high as level as we can achieve. Where we are working towards requirements we will prioritise those that appear to have the most impact.
• our aim is to meet all priority 1 requirements of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0).  Meeting this standard is commonly known as Level A compliance
• we also aim to meet as many priority 2 requirements of the WCAG 2.0 as possible. Meeting this standard is commonly known as Level AA compliance
• in commissioning new websites and maintaining the accessibility of existing sites, we aim to follow best practice guidelines using British standard BS 8878. Previously we used the guidelines described in the British Standards Institution's Publicly Available Specification 78 (PAS 78), which has been superceded by BS8878
• during the development and live beta testing of this site we worked in house to address any level 1 and 2 checkpoints.
  

BrowseAloud speech software

All our websites are speech-enabled using a free software download called BrowseAloud. By following simple instructions, you can install BrowseAloud on to your computer and have this site read aloud to you.

Read how to use BrowseAloud on V&A websites

Feedback

If you have any questions or feedback about the accessibility of the V&A beta website, we would like to hear from you. You can contact the Web Team on webmaster@vam.ac.uk