Access

The staff are here to ensure you enjoy your visit to the collection and exhibition galleries.

Facilities

Our facilities include:

Assisted toilet facilities
Gendered toilets in the Shop
Gender-neutral toilets at the Parkside entrance
Gender-neutral toilets on the lower ground floor - downstairs on the Oxford Road side, lift available
Wheelchairs available for public use
Adequate seating with arms throughout the gallery
Light, handheld portable stools
Ear defenders
Our Grand Hall, which hosts conferences, talks, and workshops is fitted with hearing loops
4 baby changing areas
A family room - downstairs on the Oxford Road side, lift available
Coin-operated buggy locks and lockers
Large print information about exhibitions
Disabled parking on Denmark Road

The lighting levels can often be low due to the vulnerable nature of our collections.
Assistance Dogs are welcome in the gallery.

Disabled Parking

Denmark Road is directly adjacent to the gallery, it has step-free access to both our Park Side and Oxford Road entrances. There are a total of 5 disabled bays, 9 spaces for car/bus drop-off and 7 double yellow line areas, which can be used by blue badge holders.

Find more information in our Getting here section

Parkside Entrance: 3 gallery-designated disabled bays are directly beside our park entrance along Denmark road. A short step-free path from our park gates leads you to the parkside entrance.
Oxford Road Entrance: There are an additional 2 disabled bays further along on Denmark Road for the surrounding buildings. If using these you can enter through our main gates (across the bicycle lanes) and up shallow gradient ramps leading to our automatic doors, which open inwards.

If you need any assistance when arriving, please contact our Visitor Team on 0161 275 7450 who are happy to help.

Autism Friendly

Ear defenders can be borrowed from the Oxford Road desk.
We can provide quieter spaces, should you wish to access one please ask a member of staff.
Our Quieter Hours are normally after 3pm on a weekday and from 10-11am on a Sunday.
We hold a monthly creative dance workshop, open to all children and families with additional learning needs. Our Mossa Movement class encourages all to explore their own ideas as well as learn simple movements in a safe and encouraging environment.

Families

We offer the following

Free nappies and wipes
Pushchair access at both our entrances.
A coin-operated buggy park situated on the lower ground floor
Coin-operated lockers
4 baby change areas
An emergency baby supplies kit at the Oxford Road reception desk which includes nappies, wipes and other essentials.

You are welcome to breast or bottle feed babies in our gallery spaces, where there is plenty of seating. If you would like somewhere a little more private then please ask a member of staff for some suggestions.
Food cannot be consumed anywhere in the gallery spaces, however if you fancy a snack then you can eat on the Lower Promenade, visit our Café in the Trees or enjoy a picnic in the Art Garden.

Safety in the building

The safety and wellbeing of our visitors is our main focus. Our Health & Safety policies and procedures ensure spaces are risk assessed on a regular basis and the Visitor Team are fully trained in First Aid, Fire Marshal and full evacuation procedures. All team members are identified through uniforms and name badges to help assist all our visitors.

Assessments

We continue to work with people with diverse abilities and support needs along with specialist organisations to continue to improve our visitor offer. An internal Access Group also meets regularly to keep us on track and moving forward.

Do you have any questions about your visit to the gallery?

We are always trying to improve our offer and we’d love to hear about your visit and any feedback.
Please call us on 0161 275 7450 or email the Visitor Team.
Thinking of bringing a group to the gallery? Read more about group visits.

Web accessibility

We want as many people as possible to be able to use our website and we are continually working towards improving its accessibility. We follow general principles of usability and universal design, and endeavour to meet level 2 (AA) of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1.

Our website will allow you to:

zoom in up to 200% without the text spilling off the screen
navigate most of the website using just a keyboard or speech recognition tools
listen to most of the website using a screen reader
view essential audio-visual information (captions or transcriptions are provided in most cases)

How accessible this website is

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

Some sections cannot be navigated with just a keyboard (megamenus)\
Images of artworks in our Collection Search don’t all have alt-text descriptions so they can’t be read by a screen reader
Some older PDF documents may not be fully accessible to screen reader software
Some videos may not have captions or audio descriptions

Please see the Technical Information section below for more detailed information on known accessibility issues.

Making changes to your device

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

Also, the University’s Disability Advisory and Support Service (DASS) website offers up-to-date information for prospective students and staff with specific learning difficulties, disabilities, sensory impairments, mental health difficulties and medical conditions.

Reporting accessibility problems with this website

Please email web-accessibility@manchester.ac.uk if you have an accessibility query (including about content not within the scope of the accessibility regulation), identify any problems not listed on this page or think we’re not meeting accessibility requirements. Please provide the web address (URL) of the page(s) in which you find the problem, a description of the issue and your name. We will consider your request and get back to you within ten working days.

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 please let us know. If you remain unsatisfied, contact the Equality Advisory and Support Service (EASS).

Technical information about this website’s accessibility

We are committed to making our website accessible, in accordance with the relevant accessibility regulations.

This website is partially compliant with the WCAG 2.1 AA standard, due to the instances of non-compliance and exceptions listed below.

Non-accessible content

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

Non-compliance with the accessibility regulations

Issues with navigation, text and images

Some images do not have a text alternative, so people using a screen reader cannot access the information (WCAG: 1.1.1).
Colour contrast may not be sufficient on some webpages which could make these pages difficult to read for some users with visual impairments (WCAG: 1.4.3).
Our megamenus are not accessible using a keyboard so people using a screen reader may find navigating our website difficult (WCAG: 2.1.1)

We are working to fix the issues above by September 2020.

Issues with video and audio

Not all audios or videos with audio have captions or transcriptions. We aim to offer an alternate version of all videos and audios published on or after September 2020. However, older videos and audios may not have an alternate version. (WCAG: 1.2.2)
Some videos without audio that ideally should have audio descriptions do not have this (WCAG: 1.2.5).

We are working to develop transcripts or other alternative versions of all our videos and audios published on or after September 2020.

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

PDFs and other documents

Some non-essential PDF documents that were published before 23 September 2018 may not be fully accessible. All subsequent PDF documents will comply with accessibility regulations.

Maps

Our website has online maps which are unlikely to be fully accessible because of the assistive technologies used in their development. An alternative format is provided in most circumstances. For example, links to PDF files are added in our maps and travel page.

Third party-content

Our site uses third-party content which may not be fully accessible. This includes content we publish on social media channels such as Twitter or You Tube, or documents hosted on the digital platform Issuu. We are responsible for ensuring the accessibility of the content we produce, however we have no control over the accessibility of these platforms.

Live video

Our live videos don’t have captions.

How we tested this website

This website is scanned automatically every seven days using an external service. The scan report highlights any content that is not compliant with WCAG 2.1.

What we’re doing to improve accessibility

We have an ongoing programme of work to address any accessibility issues that are highlighted by our weekly scans. We are continually working on our content and site structure, and finding ways to make the site more intuitive and easy to navigate. We are developing guidelines on how to create accessible content to help those colleagues working on other University websites.

This statement was published on 22/09/2020.