NHS Education for Scotland (NES) is committed to easy access for everyone. We're continually working towards improving the accessibility of this website, to make sure we provide equal access to all our users.
The NHS Education for Scotland website has been redesigned and was launched on September 28th 2020.
The website is fully accessible in line with the new government legislation.
This website is improved on a regular basis in an Agile way and we want to be clear and transparent with regards to what we are doing to improve accessibility for the users of this software.
This website is run by NHS Education for Scotland . We want as many people as possible to be able to use this website. For example, that means you should be able to:
- 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
- skip to content links at the top of the page
AbilityNet has advice on making your device easier to use if you have a disability.
How accessible this website is
This website is compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1 AA standard.
How accessible our documents are
New documents we publish and documents you need to download or fill in to access one of the services we provide should be fully accessible.
However, we know that some of our older documents (published before 23 September 2018) are not accessible. For example, some of them:
- are just photocopies and are not marked up in a way that allows screen reader users to understand them
- are not tagged up properly - for example, they do not contain proper headings
This mostly applies to our older PDF and Word documents examples of them are located within our procurement and board paper sections. These types of documents are exempt from the regulations, so we do not currently have any plans to make them accessible.
How accessible our videos are
From September 23rd 2020 all video content should have captions. However there may be circumstances where this is not possible such as:
- The video is too long to caption and would not be cost effective to do so
- There are not enough resources to caption video at the time
- Captioning software can have issues with the local dialect which can produce inaccurate captions. This could cause problems when the correct spelling of a medical term is essential.
As a result, manual correction of captions is required for our videos and this is one of the factors we assess when we consider our approach to developing captions and transcripts for videos.
This would be a fail on WCAG Success Criterion 1.2.2 Captions (Prerecorded).
Some of our older videos and live streams do not have captions. This type of video content is exempt from the regulations and we do not currently have any plans to make them accessible.
Getting in touch
If there is video content that you are not able to access and wish to do so please get in touch at support.web@nes.scot.nhs.uk and we will consider your request and get back to you within 5 days.
If you are currently using captions to access our video content, we would love to hear from you with any feedback as this will allow us to improve our service.
What to do if you can’t access parts of this website
If you need information on this website in a different format like accessible PDF, large print, easy read, audio recording or braille:
Email: support.web@nes.scot.nhs.uk
Telephone: 0141 223 1400 (ask for Colin Sanders).
We’ll consider your request and get back to you in 5 days.
Enforcement procedure
The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) is responsible for enforcing the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Websites) (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
Our offices have audio induction loops, or if you contact us before your visit we can arrange a British Sign Language (BSL) interpreter. If you are deaf and would like to communicate with us without visiting the office please contact us using the email address below and we can use contactSCOTLAND-BSL interpretation service to discuss your issues.
Email:colin.sanders@nhs.scot
Telephone: 0141 223 1400 (ask for Colin Sanders)
Address: 2 Central Quay, 89 Hydepark Street, Glasgow, G3 8BW
Technical information about this website’s accessibility
NHS Education for Scotland is committed to making its website accessible, in accordance with the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Websites) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018.
This website is compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1 AA standard.
How we tested this website
This website was last tested on the 18th September 2020. The test was carried out by a member of staff from NES Digital using a combination of Funkify (Chrome plugin) and Lighthouse Accessibility Auditing Tools (integrated Chrome and Internet Explorer development tool).
Pages that were tested:
- homepage
- about page
- pages with content
- contact page
- news page