Accessibility statement

In addition to the website accessibility benefits mentioned in this section, we have invested in the Recite overlay tool that makes it easy for users to

• have text read out loud,
• change text size, colours and font,
• provide a visual focus window to help concentration.
• selected text content on a page can also be downloaded as an MP3 file to listen to separately.

You can also find useful guidance on adjusting your laptop or phone to suit your need on these resources MyComputerMyWay or Scope guidance on phone accessibility features In addition, major operating systems produce the following guidance:

• Advice for Microsoft users
• Advice for Apple users
• Advice for Linux users
• Advice for Android users

Visual aspects of the website

• The website pages reflow to fit the resolution and orientation of your device. We have tested this up to a zoom level of 400% on a wide sample of pages.

• On a laptop/PC browser, you can magnify text either by
• using the inbuilt browser zoom function - CTRL + (Windows) or CMD + (Mac).
• using the Recite toolbar, or
• increasing the default font size in your browser settings (or with browser plugins - for example A+ Font SizeChangerLite for Chrome)

Using a mix of both techniques can give fine-tuned viewing experiences.

• On a mobile device get magnification and reflow by changing the browser default font size and default display size in the accessibility settings menu.
• All PDFs sampled could be magnified and reflowed to fit the screen width in Adobe Reader using the inbuilt View>Zoom > Reflow functionality.

Personalising colours

• Pages have been designed so that users should be able to change font size and colours within the browser settings, using the Recite toolbar or using browser plug-ins like HighContrast.

Navigation

• Almost all downloadable PDFs could be efficiently browsed by a good heading structure in the bookmarks panel as well as a hyperlinked table of contents.
• The heading structure of most pages sampled is logical and hierarchical, allowing assistive technology users to navigate quickly to any part of the page – for example using a browser plugin like HeadingsMap or inbuilt screenreader functionality. Some pages (see sections below) have heading levels missing or reversed.
• All links will open in the same browser window, except for links to external websites.
• Most content can be accessed by keyboard-only actions, but this is not as easy as it should be.

Listening to content

All text content on pages content can be accessed by text to speech tools including

• The Recite text to speech feature,
• browser based plugins like Selection Reader for Chrome,
• clipboard readers like Orato and the ATBar,
• commercial text to speech tools.

Language

• Almost all pages have their language identified for screenreader users. The one exception noted in the sampling was online applications.
• The Recite toolbar allows users to translate the page into their preferred language.

In alignment with our commitment to accessibility guidelines, New College Lanarkshire unveiled the latest version of their website on October 26, 2023. We've done a lot of testing on the website, but we're now asking Ability Net for help to make it clear who can use the site and where we will need to plan in further review and testing.

If you need information on this website in a different format like accessible PDF, Word or HTML please contact us using the details below and letting us know what it is you’re trying to find out about. 

• Email - webaccessibility@nclan.ac.uk 
• Facebook - /nclanarkshire
• Twitter - /nclanarkshire

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

In addition to the known issues, we only sampled a subset of pages. Users may find pages that contain accessibility issues we have not discovered yet. This reporting process, being technical and disability specific, may be very different from the one above – or it may go through a similar system with a different subject line or filter. 

If you find an accessibility problem with this site that we have not covered in the accessibility statement, please let us know so we can add it to our work plan. Contact us with any accessibility related barriers by emailing webaccessibility@nclan.ac.uk

We aim to meet the needs of all our students as best we can and our internal support and complaints procedures help us to do this however, if you are not satisfied with the response 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).

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

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

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

Non-compliance with the accessibility regulations

This list is currently based on limited testing of a sample of key pages. If you come across additional issues, please contact us using the contact details in the sections above.

Documents

• Whilst most PDF documents sampled met good accessibility standards, a few key documents are not tagged for navigation by bookmark panel or screenreaders. This fails checkpoint 2.4.6 Headings and labels.  

• Some of our pages (for example equality and diversity resources) have extensive links to external 3^rd party content which we do not control. This is out of scope for the regulations.
  
  
• There are some PDF documents on the website which are inaccessible but are out of scope for the accessibility regulations being pre Sept 23^rd 2018 and not in active administrative use.

In alignment with our commitment to accessibility guidelines, New College Lanarkshire unveiled the latest version of their website on October 26, 2023. We are now asking Ability Net for help to carry out further testing to carry out an external review and further testing.

Further details on our testing processes will be detailed by the end of year - 2023.

We are committed to improving accessibility across our websites, apps and other digital platforms. An accessibility working group is in the progress of being established by the College to ensure a continuous improvement of accessibility of digital content. In addition, we are:

• Arranging further testing
• Running additional training sessions with website editors
• Establishing a new website publishing model to check the accessibility of content before it is published to the live website
• Establishing owners of content to ensure timely removal of inaccessible content
• Working with third party suppliers to improve the accessibility of other digital platforms
• Ensuring all new videos after 23 September 2020 on the site are AA compliant e.g. transcripts, audio descriptions and subtitles
• Ongoing improvements to New College Lanarkshire website systems with a focus on accessibility
• Prioritising accessibility remedial work in all new development and improvement projects
• Plans to remove, update or replace older PDFs with more accessible content.