Our Commitment to Web Accessibility - Waterford City & County Council

Compliance Status

Our aim is to ensure that everyone can use our website, including people with disabilities. We have worked to make the website as accessible and usable as possible for every user, and do so on an ongoing basis by reviewing and altering content, imagery etc.

The Waterford City & County Council website is partially compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 level AA, due to the non-accessible content and exemptions listed below.

Non-Accessible Content

The content listed below is non-accessible, or non-compliant for the following reasons:

Non-compliance with certain web accessibility standards, including:

Older (pre 2018) PDF documents are generally not accessible to screen reader software. These documents have been added to a separate Archive, available at archive.waterfordcouncil.ie
Some images may not have appropriate or missing alternative text descriptions. We have endeavoured to ensure that all images are compliant but may have missed, or been supplied with an inaccessible image.
Housing Applicant Appointment system. This legacy 3rd-party system has issues with:
- Minimum contrast ratio thresholds
- ARIA labels
- Hidden form elements lacking labels
- Certain paper based downloadable forms
- 3rd Party SaaS systems
  We use several 3rd party companies on a SaaS basis (Software as a Service). While we strive to use accessible services, we cannot guarantee the compliance of external platforms. Users encountering issues with third-party tools should refer to the accessibility statement of the respective provider.Examples of these services, linked from our site are:
  - Public Consultations portal (Cloud hosted) – https://consult.waterfordcouncil.ie
  - The Planning Applications Map and Text finders available at https://waterford-ie.maps.arcgis.com/apps/instant/basic/index.html?appid=5bd78fbb47144349bb9c6bf473d4bd85
  - The online payments system at https://www.mycoco.ie – a national, local government system.

Exemptions: Certain content is exempt from the accessibility regulations under Directive (EU) 2016/2102, including:

Pre-recorded time-based media published before September 23, 2020.
Heritage collections like scanned manuscripts, where converting them to accessible formats would be unfeasible or would destroy their intrinsic value.

If you encounter an issue that is not listed here, or any issue as outlined above (e.g. images), please contact us by filling in this online form.

Preparation of this Accessibility Statement

This statement was prepared on March 4th 2024 and is continually updated to reflect changes on our website.

It was last reviewed on August 24th 2024.

Testing of the website for accessibility issues, in so far as is practicable, is ongoing, and content created with accessibility in mind.

We continuously use :

Axe Monitor (including DevTools): a comprehensive accessibility testing tool developed by Deque Systems.
The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) set of tools.
ADA Site Compliance’s colour contrast tools.
The CUID set of tools and resources (part of the NDA of Ireland).

Feedback

We welcome your feedback on the accessibility of Waterford City & County Council’s website.

Online Form
Email: website@waterfordcouncil.ie
Phone: 0818 10 20 20

We try to respond to feedback within 3 working days.

If you are not satisfied with our response to your feedback, you may contact the relevant national authority, under the complaints and redress mechanism of either the Equal Status Act 2000 (No. 8 of 2000) or the Disability Act 2005 (No. 14 of 2005).

Advice on making a complaint under the Disability Act is available on the website of the Office of the Ombudsman.

Advice on making a complaint under the Equal Status Act is available on the website of the Workplace Relations Commission.