Accessibilty statement for South West College

South West College is committed to making the user experience, when accessing our information and services, an accessible and inclusive one.  This accessibility statement applies to www.swc.ac.uk student and staff Gateway and Canvas.

This website is run by South West College.  We want as many people as possible to be able to use this website. For example, that means you should be able to: 

• change most 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 
• navigate most of the website using speech recognition software 
• listen to most of the website using a screen reader (including the most recent versions of JAWS, NVDA and VoiceOver) 

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

How Accessible this website is

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

• Most older PDF and Word documents are not fully accessible to screen reader software 
• ​Some of our online forms can be difficult to navigate using just a keyboard

Additional Support

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

Feedback and contact information

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

• email the equality officer on equality@swc.ac.uk or  
• ​call 028 8255 0109 

Please specify: 

• The web address (URL) of the content 
• Your name and email address
• The format you need 

We’ll consider your request and get back to you in 10 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, you can do so on our contact form contact us or you can email us at web@swc.ac.uk

Enforcement procedure

The Equalities Commission for Northern Ireland (ECNI) is responsible for enforcing the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018 (the ‘accessibility regulations’). You may contact them if you’re not happy with how we respond to your complaint.

Contacting us by phone or visiting us in person

We provide a text relay service for people who are D/deaf, hearing impaired or have a speech impediment. Our offices have audio induction loops, or if you contact us before your visit we can arrange a British Sign Language (BSL) interpreter. Find out how to contact us.

Technical information about this website's accessibilty

South West College is committed to making its website accessible, in accordance with the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018. 

Compliance status

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

Non-accessible content

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

Non-compliance with the accessibility regulations

We carried out an audit and have fixed a number of issues.  The items detailed below remain and we will continue to work on these and aim to have these corrected soon.   

• The CSS outline or border style on this element makes it difficult or impossible to see the dotted link focus outline.

Disproportionate burden

Not applicable

Navigation and accessing information

There is limited scope to skip the repeated content in page headers (for example, a ‘skip to main content’ option).

Interactive tools and transactions

Some of our interactive forms are difficult to navigate using a keyboard. For example, because some form controls are missing a ‘label’ tag. Our forms are built and hosted through third party software and ‘skinned’ to look like our website.

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

PDFs and other documents

Some of our PDFs and Word documents provide information on how users can access our services, and we have taken steps to make these accessible. However, 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. For example, we do not plan to fix documents relating to minutes and agendas from old meetings, but these can be made available in alternative formats on request.

Any new PDFs or Word documents we publish will meet accessibility standards.

Live video

Live video streams will not have captions - these are exempt from meeting the accessibility regulations.

What we’re doing to improve accessibility

We will continue to upload content and publish documents in line with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1 AA standard.

Preparation of this accessibility statement

This statement was prepared on 23rd September 2020. It was last reviewed on 23rd September 2020. 

This website was last tested on 23nd September 2020. The test was carried out by Zesty. The following tools were used to highlight our website’s conformance to W3c’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1.  

• SortSite - web site testing tool 

• ​WAVE Accessibility Checker - wave.webaim.org 

• Web Accessibility Checker - achecker.ca 

• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1

This audit approach sampled a number of pages to test which included some of the most visited web pages, online forms and pages with differing types of content. Our website support company Zesty implemented accessibility fixes based on this report to the code issues. Content issues were addressed by South West College.

You can see a sample accessibility report of the South West College website

This statement will be reviewed and updated and an on going basis.