Accessibility Statement

Accessibility statement for MHRA Products

This website is run by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency. 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
  • zoom in up to 300% without the text spilling off the screen
  • navigate most of the website using just a keyboard
  • listen to most of the website using a screen reader

We’ve also made the website text as simple as possible to understand.

AbilityNet has advice on making your device easier to use if you have a disability.

How accessible this website is

We know some parts of this website are not fully accessible:

  • Many of the PDFs, which are produced by third party organisations, will often not be fully accessible. For example, they may not have proper headings or alt text on images.

What to do if you cannot access parts of this website

If you need information on this website in a different format like accessible PDF, large print, easy read, audio recording or braille:

We’ll consider your request and get back to you in 18 working days.

Reporting accessibility problems with this website

We’re always looking to improve the accessibility of this website. If you find any problems not listed on this page or think we’re not meeting accessibility requirements, contact: webupdates@mhra.gov.uk.

This email will go to our News, Digital and Content Team.

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 Equality Advisory and Support Service (EASS).

Technical information about this website’s accessibility

The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency is committed to making its website accessible, in accordance with the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018.

This website is partially compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1 AA standard, due to the non-compliances listed below.

Non accessible content

The content listed below is non-accessible for the following reasons.

The majority of PDFs are not accessible because they were produced by third-party organisations.

The majority of PDFs, whether created by the MHRA or by third parties, were also created prior to 23 September 2018 and are out of scope.

Non compliance with the accessibility regulations

The website does not feature a ‘Skip to Content’ link This fails on WCAG 2.1 AA 2.4.1 (Bypass Blocks) We plan to fix this in the first half of 2020

Content that’s not within the scope of the accessibility regulations

PDFs

The SPC and PIL PDFs published on this website are created by third parties. These do not fall within the scope of the Accessibility regulations under section 4 (2) (e), which refer to ‘third-party content that is neither funded nor developed by, nor under the control of, the public sector body’.

Many of our older PARs PDFs do not meet accessibility standards - for example, they may not be structured so they’re accessible to a screen reader. This does not meet WCAG 2.1 success criterion 4.1.2 (name, role value).

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.

We will be ensuring that PDFs published in the future do meet the accessibility regulations.

How we tested this website

This website was last tested on 16 December 2019. The test was carried out by the testing team at the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency.

We used below approach when testing.

We tested all functions of the website on:

  • Chrome
  • Firefox
  • Internet Explorer 11

We tested different search terms on the website, including PIL numbers. We also tested the A-Z/0-9 Active substance functionality with different areas selected.

We used a colour picker tool and the WCAG site to check colour contrast.

This statement was prepared on 17 December 2019. It was last updated on 17 December 2019.