Accessibility

• Any reference to ‘We’, ‘Us’ and ‘Our’ is to The Royal Society of Chemistry as an organisation
• Any reference to ‘Our websites’ is to websites available within rsc.org and www.chemspider.com
• Any reference to ‘You’, Your’ is to you as an individual user of Our websites

Our commitment to accessibility

The Royal Society of Chemistry is committed to ensuring our websites are accessible and usable to the widest possible audience, regardless of technology or ability.

Aligned to our commitment to inclusion and diversity, and our obligations under the Equality Act 2010 and the Special education needs and disability (SEND) code of practice (2014), we aim to make our websites as accessible as possible to users.

To achieve this, we are continually improving the accessibility and usability of our website in line with the latest accessibility standards and best practice.

Guidelines and standards

We have recently redeveloped www.rsc.org and have made every effort to make it accessible. This has included working with the level Double-A standard of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. Our conformance with these guidelines, benefits all our users by making the website easier to use.

Whilst we intend to make each of our websites as accessible as possible, it is not always straightforward to do this on all areas of a website. Our aim is to continue to improve our websites based on the W3C WCAG 2.0 standard and exceed this standard where possible.

We work with the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) to perform accessibility testing. This has included completion of Voluntary Product Accessibility Templates (VPAT) forms on some of our web platforms. VPATs are currently available for pubs.rsc.org and the Merck Index Online, and can be made available upon request.

We also frequently conduct accessibility audits and conduct live user testing on our websites to identify ways in which we can improve the experience.

Support and feedback

If you are experiences problems with using any of our websites, please contact our web team. This will enable us to support you, recognise issues and prioritise the improvements we make.