Accessibility statement - www.ulpgc.es

What is accessibility?

A website is considered accessible when any person is capable of using and understanding its contents, regardless of their physical, psychological or any other limitations; and regardless of the features of their browser equipment or of the environment from which they access the website.

Ensuring the accessibility of a website means trying to break down the physical and social barriers which hinder many people from making adequate use of the services and contents offered via the website.

Since 2006, the websites of Spanish public administration have a legal requirement to be accessible for the disabled and for the elderly. The most recent and comprehensive regulation on accessibility is Royal Decree 1112/2018, dated September 7, on accessibility to public sector websites and mobile device applications. Royal Decree 1112/2018 establishes as the standard for website accessibility the recommendations of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), put together by the WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative) working group and described in the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) documents.

ULPGC's commitment to accessibility

At the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, we have a strong commitment to reaching complete integration of all members of the university community and of society in general. One of our priorities is to allow universal access to the contents which are published on the website. Our objective for the institutional website www.ulpgc.es is to reach an AA accessibility level as specified in the guidelines of the WCAG documents. In general terms, the pages of the institutional website meet the AA accessibility level. As well as meeting the standards and following the guidelines for accessibility, we have designed the website so that browsing is easy for the majority of users.

Some zones of the institutional website cannot guarantee a level of complete accessibility, due to the disproportionate load that their updating would require (article 7 of Royal Decree 1112/2018). This is the case with the corporate intranet mi.ulpgc.es and of the pages which were inherited from the old institutional website (replaced in 2014), which are the pages with a URL beginning with www2.ulpgc.es/... These areas of the website contain a complexity, volume and diversity of applications which make it unfeasible to reach full compliance with AA level with the resources available to use at the ULPGC. Nonetheless, we will try to maintain those pages at a level which is acceptable and very close to the standard of the principal website.

Unit with responsibility for accessibility: URGWAC

The Unit with Responsibility for Website Management and Accessibility (URGWAC) is the unit with responsibility for matters of accessibility for the institutional website of the ULPGC and carries out the functions established by article 16 of Royal Decree 1112/2018. It was created by virtue of the ruling of the Chancellor on January 30, 2020, as the unit to succeed the Web Committee, which had been in charge of these same functions until that date.

The URGWAC comprises representatives of the units with responsibilities in the website services of the URGWAC:

  • The vice-chancellorships with responsibilities for communication, quality and innovation.
  • Technical personnel from the Communications Office, from the IT Service and from the Institutional Evaluation Office.

The URGWAC carries out these main functions, in relation to the accessibility of the ULPGC website and according to the framework established in Royal Decree 1112/2018:

  • To coordinate and seek the effective functioning of the mechanisms of communication.
  • To attend and reply to claims concerning accessibility.
  • To coordinate periodical reviews of accessibility.
  • To coordinate and encourage promotional, awareness-raising and training activities.

Communications about accessibility

If you wish to inform us of any non-compliance with the accessibility requisites on this website, or any difficulty over access to its contents, or you wish to make any suggestion for improvement relating to accessibility, you can use these channels:

Telematic attention, via the ULPGC's general system for complaints, suggestions and congratulations.
By telephone, to the ULPGC Service for Social Attention: (+34) 928 453381 and (+34) 928 453399. 

Requests for accessible information and complaints

Send a request or a complaint. If you want to make any complaint concerning the accessibility of our website, or you want to obtain information about non-accessible contents (article 3 of Royal Decree 1112/2018), you can do so via the ULPGC's general system for complaints, suggestions and congratulations, addressing your written communication to the Unit with Responsibility for Website Management and Accessibility (URGWAC). 

Claims. If you do not agree with the response received to the complaint or to a request for accessible information, you can make a claim, as set out in article 13 of Royal Decree 1112/2018. This claim should be addressed to the Unit with Responsibility for Website Management and Accessibility (URGWAC), via the same ULPGC general system for complaints, suggestions and congratulations.

Accessibility technical specifications

These are some of the technical specifications of criteria followed in the architecture of the ULPGC institutional website to meet the desired level of accessibility.

  • Separation of contents and presentation. The website has been designed using CSS3 style sheets, strictly separating the contents from the visual presentation form.
  • Page structure. The pages use semantic structuring tags. The tags <H1> and <H2> are used to locate the sections of each page. In the pages served by the Drupal contents manager the HTML5 tags <header>, <footer> and <nav> are used to distinguish the architectural elements of the page.
  • Accessible visual design. The visual design itself is conceived so as to give an accessible experience for most users: font size, colour contrast, size and locations of clickable zones, etc. In the event that the user has visual or motor difficulties, they can make use of personalised configurations, or specialised browsers, without the structure of the pages making it difficult to adapt to special requirements.
  • Images. In general terms, the images published on the webpages have alternative captions (by means of the ALT) feature so that those persons who cannot see the images have an idea of their content.
  • Links. Many of the links contain features which describe the link in greater details.
  • JavaScript. JavaScript is only used when strictly necessary to provide non essential visual effects and functionalities which are not related to the content, such as browser monitoring. In most cases, the basic contents of a page can be attained without need to run JavaScript.