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Accessibility statement

This accessibility statement applies to South Lanarkshire Council's website.

This website is run by South Lanarkshire Council. 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
  • 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 clear as possible to understand.

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

To provide the best possible experience a mobile phone some elements are removed when you view the site on a phone to improve the usability and user experience.

How accessible this website is

We know some parts of this website aren’t fully accessible.

  • most older PDF documents are not fully accessible to screen reader software
  • the homepage slider does not resize correctly at 125% and above, making it challenging for the user
  • older videos don't have captions

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 you should email equalities@southlanarkshire.gov.uk

We’ll consider your request and get back to you in 5 days.

Reporting accessibility problems with this website

We’re always looking to improve the accessibility of this website. If you find any problems that aren’t listed on this page or think we’re not meeting the requirements of the accessibility regulations, email webfeedback@southlanarkshire.gov.uk.

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

South Lanarkshire Council 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.

PDFs

Pdfs uploaded after September 2020 are fully accessible. Pdfs uploaded between September 2018 and September 2020 are not fully accessible. We have identified 19 documents that are for an audience who may have disabilities. We will prioritise fixing these and hope to have them accessible by September 2021.

It would be a disproportionate burden to fix the others uploaded in that period and so we will replace these with accessible versions or delete them as they need updated. There will be a rolling programme which we aim to have completed by September 2022.

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 Routes Around Morgan Glen.

Any new PDFs we publish will meet accessibility standards.

The homepage slider

At the moment the homepage slider does not resize correctly at 125% and above, making it challenging if you need to enlarge the size of the website on your screen. The arrows to move the slider disappear. For this to be fixed, the code of the website would have to be changed and at the moment this can't be done due to a major web project which needs the website's code to remain unchanged until it is complete. This is expected to be finished in the autumn this year and we will fix this issue then.

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

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 Routes Around Morgan Glen.

Live video

We do not plan to add captions to live video streams because live video is exempt from meeting the accessibility regulations.

External web services

Some or our web services are run by external companies and they are responsible for their own accessibility. These are:

How we tested this website

This website is tested weekly using SiteImprove with the last full crawl completed on 15 September 2020. These results were also verified using a subsection crawl via SilkTide. SiteImprove have just released the NextGen release of their application to comply with the 2.1 version of the standard and we are working within the limitations/functionality of the product.

For this testing we did not sample pages, we performed a full site crawl to establish a more accurate understanding of the accessibility rating.

We tested our main council website and the following microsites:

We can send you a copy of the latest report if you email webfeedback@southlanarkshire.gov.uk

This statement was prepared on 22 September 2020 and last updated on 9 June 2021.

How to use the ReadSpeaker Listen function

ReadSpeaker allows the text on the website to be read out loud to you. It provides you assistance if you have trouble reading text online. By having the text read out loud to you, you can understand the information on the website more easily. This makes the content more accessible and the website more pleasant to visit. As a user you don't have to download anything.

You simply click the Listen button to listen to the webpage's content. An audio player appears and ReadSpeaker starts reading the text of the webpage out loud.

In the player you can:

  • pause/restart the reading
  • stop the reading
  • use the progress bar to navigate in the audio
  • adjust the volume
  • click the settings icon to adjust the behaviour of the service
  • click the download icon to download the audio file
  • close the player

You can use tab/shift+tab to navigate inside the player and press enter to activate a certain button or link.

You can select a part of the text that you want to listen to and then press the pop-up Listen button that appears next to the mouse pointer. When you click the pop-up Listen button, an audio player appears and ReadSpeaker starts reading the text you have selected.

In the settings menu, you can choose:

  • whether you want to have the text highlighted while read
  • whether you want the text highlighted on a word and sentence basis, sentence only, or word only
  • style and colours for the highlighting
  • whether you want the reading speed to be slow, medium, or fast
  • whether you want the page to scroll automatically to follow the highlighted text
  • whether you want the pop-up Listen button to be shown when text is selected