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Accessibility statement for cypcs.org.uk

This is our accessibility statement for this website, https://cypcs.org.uk. It applies to this website and all the documents it contains.
https://cypcs.org.uk is the website of the Children and Young People’s Commissioner Scotland, who has a legal duty to promote and protect children’s human rights. Those rights – as laid out in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and many other international laws – make clear that:

What should I be able to do?

Our accessibility features should mean that:

  • you can zoom in up to 300% without text spilling off the screen,
  • you can listen to most of the website and some of the documents on it using a screen reader,
  • you can search most of the website with speech recognition software (although there are still some bugs with this),
  • you can get to where you want to go on the website using only a keyboard.

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

Guidelines which we have to follow

There are accessibility guidelines used around the world called the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1.

The guidelines have goals that are split into three levels based on how vital they are to make a website that works for everyone and how challenging they are for the people who build the websites to meet:

  • Goals at Level A
  • Goals at Level AA
  • Goals at Level AAA

Regulations in force across the UK mean our website has to meet these guidelines to at least AA standard.

But we want to do more than this. We want our website to be as clear and useful to as many people as possible, because that’s a necessary part of building a culture of children’s human rights across Scotland. Right now, most of our website is to AA standard and some of it is to AAA standard, and we’re working on making sure we meet all Level AA goals. 

What we still have to do to meet AA standard

We’re aware of the following ways in which our website currently doesn’t meet AA standard:

  • We should have text alternatives available for the videos on our website.
  • The forms on our website aren’t all labelled in a way that means assistive technologies can work properly with them, and they don’t all have labels that are unique.
  • Some elements of our site don’t have enough contrast.
  • Not all form links can be determined through link text alone.
  • There are some outstanding bugs in markup language.
  • An issue exists where screen readers won’t read out links.

How we intend to do better than AA standard

Some ways in which we intend to go further than AA standard are:

Our BSL Plan

Our BSL Plan and BSL Plan Promises set out some of the ways in which we intend to provide information in British Sign Language (BSL) for prerecorded media.

Making children’s rights issues clearer for everyone

Our FAQs on children’s human rights explains complicated issues in a way that’s clear and accessible. It contains definitions of several words and concepts that a user may not know about and may struggle to find clear explanations around.

Feedback and contact information

If you need information on this website in a different format, you can contact us at inbox@cypcs.org.uk with your request. We’ll get back to you within 30 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, contact us on inbox@cypcs.org.uk and our communications team will get back to you.

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).

Legal declaration of accessibility

Some of the words and phrases used in the sections below have to be used so this accessibility statement says what it needs to under the law. We’ve still tried to make it as clear as we can.

Technical information about this website’s accessibility

The Commissioner for Children and Young People in Scotland 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.

The content listed below is non-accessible for the following reasons. We’re working to get a timeline in place for fixing all these issues, and will update this page once it’s in place.

Non-compliance with the accessibility regulations

Disproportionate burden

We’re not aware of any accessibility issues which would be a disproportionate burden for us to fix.

That means that we don’t think there are any issues which would be so difficult or expensive to fix that we couldn’t justify spending time and money to fix them.

Content that’s 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. For example, we do not plan to fix past consultation responses like this one by replacing them with an HTML accessible version.

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

Live video

Captioning live video is exempt from meeting the accessibility regulations. We still intend to look into doing this, but will focus on the other changes highlighted in this document first.

Preparation of this accessibility statement

This statement was prepared on Thursday 6 May 2021. It was last reviewed on Wednesday 14 July 2021.

This website was last tested through a period ending Thursday 6 May 2021. The test was carried out by ourselves, and conducted over all pages on the website.

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