Statement of commitment

Focus Ireland is committed to making focusireland.ie  accessible in accordance with EU Web Accessibility Directive

We are committed to achieving AA standard under WCAG 2.1 guidelines.

Compliance status

focusireland.ie is partially compliant with WCAG 2.1 AA guidelines.

Non-accessible content

Colour Contrast: There are some site-wide issues with colour contrast that we have identified, and we are addressing as a matter of urgency to meet colour contrast requirements. ( WCAG guideline 1.4.3)

Images: Not all images on focusireland.ie have photo (or meta-) descriptions. If images do not have the correct descriptions then a user using assistive technologies will not learn the information conveyed in the image ( WCAG guidelines 1.1.1 )

Link text: Not all links have discernible link text such as ‘Read More’ or ‘Download links’. We are working through our current accessibility audit to remedy instances of the same text used for links to different content ( WCAG guidelines 2.4.4 )

PDFs: Many documents are published as PDFs – which are less accessible than HTML pages for people using assistive technologies. Some of the issues with PDFs include:

the fact that they are not bookmarked ( WCAG guideline 2.4.5 )

tables in PDFs are not defined ( WCAG guideline 1.3.1 )

This content is not an exhaustive list of non-accessible content.

Exempted content

• Donate Now – Our donation platform is a third-party platform that we do not have access to make changes
• The Big Busk – This is a seasonal external website.
• PDF documents that were published before March 2023 are exempt from these guidelines and endeavour to create more accessible PDFs for future publications.
• Videos or audio published before March 2023 are exempt from these guidelines.

How we test the Focus Ireland website

We use the WCAG level AA guidelines to test how accessible gov.ie is. We used the Website Accessibility Conformance Evaluation Methodology (WCAG-EM) approach to assess the site. We have completed a recents accessibility audit (March 2023) and are working through the issues identified. We will continue to do this – particularly once the main issues identified have been addressed.

How we are improving accessibility on Focus Ireland

• We are going to make photo-descriptions mandatory on focusireland.ie and carry out regular spot-checks on photos across all departments on a quarterly basis
• We will endeavour to create more accessible PDFs, video content and graphs on the website.
• We will continue to insist that departments use plain English to describe our services and any information members of the public require access to.

Feedback and contact information

If you have any complaints about the accessibility of content used on Focus Ireland – then you can contact the Digital Team at digitalteam@focusireland.ie

This statement was last updated on 16^th March 2023.