Accessibility

Providing an accessible website

Accessibility Statement

This accessibility statement applies to www.southampton-city.ac.uk

We want as many people as possible to be able to use this website. For example, that means you should be able to:

  • 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

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 this website is

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

  • most PDF documents are not fully accessible to screen reader software
  • videos do not have captions
  • our online application form is difficult to navigate using a screen reader and keyboard

 

Feedback and contact information

If you need information on this website in a different format:

We will consider your request and get back to you in 10 working days.

If you cannot view the map on our ‘contact us’ page, call or email us for directions.

 

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 are not meeting accessibility requirements, contact the Marketing Team by email at marketing@southampton-city.ac.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 are not happy with how we respond to your complaint, contact the Equality Advisory and Support Service (EASS).

 

 

Technical information about this website’s accessibility

City College Southampton 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 the exemptions listed below.

 

Non-accessible content

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

Non-compliance with the accessibility regulations

PDFs and other documents
Our website contains many PDFs that are not accessible. Non-HTML documents published on or after 23 September 2018 must have an accessible format. This includes:

  • Some documents may not have an appropriate title. This fails WCAG success criterion 2.4.2 (page title)
  • Some documents may not have meaningful alternative text for image content. This fails WCAG success criterion 1.1.1 (non-text content)
  • Some documents contain content which is not marked up correctly. This fails WCAG success criterion 1.3.1 (info and relationships).

Our website contains content and information that is provided and published by many teams around the college. Further work is required to get this content updated to compliant standards. We are currently undertaking a separate internal audit to review these documents and updating them or providing accessible alternatives. We plan to complete this by December 2023.

Some documents, such as the prospectus, are designed to be printed and are not accessible. The information contained within this document can be found on this website.

Video
Our video content does not include captions or audio descriptions. This fails WCAG 2.1 success criterion 1.2.2 and 1.2.3 (time-based media). We plan to fix this by December 2023.

Application Form
There are some issues filling in our on-line application form when you are using a screen reader on a laptop/desktop computer. This fails WCAG 2.1 success criterion 2.1.1 (keyboard) and 2.4.3 (focus order).

Our form is built and hosted through third-party software and ‘skinned’ to look like our website. Our contract is due for renewal and the issues will be fixed by April 2024.

Content that is not within 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.

 

 

Preparation of this accessibility statement

This accessibilty statement was prepared on 8 March 2023 by the College’s internal marketing team. The statement was last reviewed on 4 September 2023. 

The sitewide audit was carried out in February 2023 by Clive Loseby from Access by Design, with some additional support from two members of Access by Design’s Team of Disabled Testers. The test was conducted using a combination of automated testing (Sortsite) and manual tests across the landing page, main page types and following a frequent user journey.