Accessibility statement

Accessibility statement for highland.gov.uk

We hope you will find this website easy to use. We are committed to making our website as accessible as possible.

This accessibility statement applies to:

This website is run by The Highland Council. We want as many people as possible to be able to use this website. That means you can:

  • 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, for example JAWS

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 is this website?

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

  • most older PDF documents are not fully accessible to screen reader software
  • some videos (including live video streams) do not have captions
  • you cannot skip to the main content on some pages when using a screen reader

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 ict.webux@highland.gov.uk and tell us what format you need - it will help us if you say what assistive technology you use.

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:

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).

Contacting us by phone or visiting us in person

If you have hearing difficulties, textphone 01349 886665.

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 on our contact us page.

Technical information about this website’s accessibility

The Highland 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.

Content that’s not in scope of the accessibility regulations

Problems that fall outside the scope of the accessibility regulations.

PDFs and other documents

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 committee papers published before 23 September 2019 or reports published before 23 September 2019 as these are considered 'archives'.

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

Live video

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

What we’re doing to improve accessibility

Our accessibility roadmap shows how and when we plan to improve accessibility on this website.

How we tested our website

We test our website regularly using automated software provided by Silktide. This allows us to monitor our performance and gives insight into accessibility issues which we then fix.

Our levels of compliance with each of the conformance levels are:

  • A - 94.3%
  • AA - 92.7%

This is based on a sample of 7500 pages and 2500 PDFs.

We identified 50 key content types (templates) that are used across our website and pages which use them. These cover:

  • images
  • form elements and a variety of input controls
  • PDFs and other documents
  • embedded content
  • page structure and readability

As well as using Silktide, we conducted manual testing using JAWS and ORCA screen readers.

Preparation of this accessibility statement

This statement was prepared on 20 September 2020. It was last reviewed on 4 August 2023.

This website was last tested on 31 July 2023.

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