Accessibility Statement

Accessibility statement for blogs.law.ed.ac.uk

Our accessibility statement covering the use of blogs.law.ed.ac.uk, inline with Public Sector Body (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018.

This accessibility statement applies to:

This blogging service (blogs.law.ed.ac.uk) is run by the Edinburgh Law School, University of Edinburgh. Blogs.law.ed.ac.uk is a blogging service at the Edinburgh Law School, University of Edinburgh. It is based on the open-source software application, WordPress (v5.5.1). We want as many people as possible to be able to use this service. For example, that means you should be able to:

change colours, contrast levels and fonts
zoom in up to 200% 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)
The system will not time you out other than after periods of long inactivity

We’ve also made the website text as simple as possible to understand and encourage staff and students to do the same with the content of their blog posts. We provide guidance on the University service webpages on how to write good and accessible posts.

The core platform’s functionality can be extended by the installation of existing plugins or the creation of new plugins. You can change how individual blog sites look by installing existing themes or creating new ones. On the blogs.law.ed platform, we’ve made a restricted selection of plugins and themes available for users to use.

Customising the service

AbilityNet has advice on making your device easier to use if you have a disability. This is an external site with suggestions to make your computer more accessible:

AbilityNet – My Computer My Way

With a few simple steps you can customise the appearance of our website using your browser settings to make it easier to read and navigate:

Additional information on how to customise our website appearance

If you are a member of University staff or a student, you can use the free SensusAccess accessible document conversion service:

Information on SensusAccess

How accessible this service is

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

some parts may not be fully compatible with screen readers
it is not possible to access all content by using the keyboard alone
not all media will have a transcript or be subtitled
some text may not reflow in a single column when you change the size of the browser window and at certain levels of magnification
some older PDF documents are not fully accessible to screen reader software
The colour contrasts of all themes won’t always meet the recommended WCAG 2.1 AA standards
Tooltips are not present in all situations
There is some use of italics and continuous capitals
Spellchecker tools are not available in all areas

Feedback and contact information

If you need information on this website in a different format, including accessible PDF, large print, audio recording or braille:

email [email protected]
telephone +44 (0)131 650 2007
British Sign Language (BSL) users can contact us via contactSCOTLAND-BSL, the on-line BSL interpreting service.

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

Reporting accessibility problems with this service

We are 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, please contact:

email [email protected]
telephone +44 (0)131 650 2007
British Sign Language (BSL) users can contact us via contactSCOTLAND-BSL, the on-line BSL interpreting service.

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

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 please contact the Equality Advisory and Support Service (EASS) directly:

Contact details for the Equality Advisory and Support Service (EASS)

The government has produced information on how to report accessibility issues:

Reporting an accessibility problem on a public sector website

British Sign Language service

British Sign Language Scotland runs a service for British Sign Language users and all of Scotland’s public bodies using video relay. This enables sign language users to contact public bodies and vice versa. The service operates from 8am to 12 midnight, 7 days a week.

British Sign Language Scotland service details

Technical information about this service’s accessibility

The University of Edinburgh is committed to making its website accessible, in accordance with the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018.

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

The full guidelines are available at:

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1 AA Standard

Non accessible content

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

Noncompliance with the accessibility regulations

The following items to not comply with the WCAG 2.1 AA success criteria:

It is not possible to use a keyboard to access all the content
- 2.1 – Keyboard accessible
Information may be conveyed as an image of text rather than as text itself so that it’s not compatible with screen readers and other assistive technology. It can also sometimes be hard to tell where you have tabbed to.
- 1.4.5 – Images of text
There may not be sufficient colour contrast between font and background colours especially where the text size is very small.
- 1.4.3 – Contrast (Minimum)
Visual information to identify user interface components, such as keyboard focus, do not always have a sufficient contrast ratio
- 1.4.11 – Non-text contrast
Not all prerecorded audio-only or video-only media will have alternative media that presents equivalent information e.g. audio track with description of the action in a video with no sound
- 1.2.1 – Audio-only and Video-only (Prerecorded)
Not all video will have subtitles or subtitles that identify all speakers as well as noting other significant sounds e.g. laughter
- 1.2.2 – Captions (Prerecorded)
Not all our PDF’s and Word documents meet accessibility standards
Some content cannot be presented without loss of information when magnified to the maximum browser level
- 1.4.10 – Reflow
It might not be possible for all form fields to be programmatically determined. This means that when using auto-fill functionality for forms not all fields will identify the meaning for input data accurately
- 1.3.5 – Identify Input Purpose
Some content cannot be presented without loss of information if the line height, paragraph spacing, letter spacing or word spacing is increased.
- 1.4.12 – Text Spacing

Unless specified otherwise a complete solution or significant improvement will be in place by September 2021 for those issues we have control over. For any that are in Core WordPress or any of the themes/plugins we use, we will report the issues to the developers by September 2020.

Disproportionate burden

We are not currently claiming that any accessibility problems would be a disproportionate burden to fix.

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

PDFs and other documents

Many of our older PDFs and Word documents do not meet accessibility standards – for example, they may not be structured so they’re accessible to a screen reader. This does not meet WCAG 2.1 success criterion 4.1.2 (name, role value).

WCAG 2.1 success criterion 4.1.2 (name, role value)

We will try to ensure any new PDFs or Word documents we publish will meet accessibility standards and where we find any that are not accessible we will rectify this as soon as possible.

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.

Regulations for PDFs or other documents published before 23 September 2018

We are running accessibility tests on PDFs just now and will aim to replace any PDFs we find which are not accessible by December 2020.

What we’re doing to improve accessibility

We will continue to develop our blogs.law.ed.ac.uk service to address the accessibility issues highlighted and deliver a solution or suitable work around.

The University has developed guidance materials for users of our service that cover how to create accessible blogs/blog posts:

We will work through all service documentation to ensure it is accessible by September 2021
We have installed a plugin to help with accessibility (WP Accessibility) which adds some accessibility features to WordPress
We’ve switched off the inaccessible Gutenberg editor and replaced it with the Classic editor. We’ll review this decision regularly.
We consistently look to use the Smartline Lite WordPress theme on our WordPress websites. This accessible theme has had minor amendments made to further improve the accessibility of the theme.
As changes are made we will continue to review accessibility and retest the accessibility of the blogging service.

We are working towards solving items that fail the WCAG 2.1 AA success criteria and expect several improvements by September 22nd 2021.

Preparation of this accessibility statement

This statement was prepared on 3rd December 2019. It was last reviewed on 18th September 2020.

This website was last tested by the University of Edinburgh’s Web Developers in September 2020 via a representative sample of pages across the website service, based upon the website theme content type templates. We tested the system on a suite of operating systems and browsers including the Internet Explorer browser (11), Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge for comparative purposes. Internet Explorer was included due to it being the most commonly used browser by disabled people, alongside its accessibility features and compatibility with assistive technology, as shown in a UK government survey: the Government Assistive Technology Browser Survey. Automated testing with Microsoft Accessibility Insights and WAVE WebAim were used to provide the findings.

We tested:

Spellcheck functionality
Data validation
Scaling using different resolutions
Options to customise the interface (magnification, font and background colour changing etc)
Keyboard navigation
Warning of links opening in a new tab or window
Information conveyed in colour or sound only
Flashing or scrolling text
Operability if Javascript is disabled
Use with screenreading software (eg. JAWS, VoiceOver)
Time limits