Standards in Public Office Commission Accessibility Statement

The Standards in Public Office Commission (SIPO) is committed to making its website accessible, in accordance with European Union (Accessibility of Websites and Mobile Applications of Public Sector Bodies) Regulations 2020.

This accessibility statement applies to content published on www.sipo.ie

Compliance Status

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

Non-accessible content

Should you wish to contact us regarding accessibility please email us at AccessOfficer@ombudsman.ie . We will do our best to ensure that any content you are requesting is made available and accessible.

We are working to improve the accessibility compliance of our website and will endeavour to apply all accessibility standards to content being published to our website.

Parts of the SIPO website are not fully accessible. For example:

• Tables: Some tables in publications do not have correctly defined headers.
• PDFs: Some documents in PDF format are not fully accessible, and may in some instances lack a correct tab order or headings
• PDFs: some contents in the appendixes of reports, such as scanned documentation may not be fully accessible
• PDFs: Some documents have no structural tags present
• MS Word Documents: Some documents in MS Word format are not fully accessible, and may in some instances lack a correct tab order or headings
• Images: Some images are missing text equivalents
• Images: all images have alt text but a number are insufficiently descriptive
• A small number of interactive controls are not nested

This is not an exhaustive list of non-accessible content and we will work through these and other issues to address them.

The Standards in Public Office Commission is undertaking two work items to improve the accessibility of this website:

1. Staff are reviewing and improving the accessibility of all PDFs on an ongoing basis
2. The Standards in Public Office Commission are engaging with our website developers to improve the design and accessibility of our website

Exempted content

Content published prior to 23 September 2018 is exempt under the EU Web Accessibility Directive. The Standards in Public Office Commission is committed to ensuring all our content is as accessible as possible. Please contact the Standards in Public Office Commission if there is any inaccessible content that was published to our site prior to September 2018 that you wish to receive in accessible format and we will endeavour to assist you.

Preparation of this accessibility statement

This statement was prepared on 28 April 2022.

In preparation for this statement an evaluation of the website’s compliance with the requirements of Directive (EU) 2016/2102 was carried out by way of a self-assessment by the Standards in Public Office Commission against WCAG 2.1

The statement was last reviewed on 28 April 2022.

This review identified a number of issues that have since been fixed.

Feedback and contact information

The Standards in Public Office Commission is committed to ensuring digital accessibility for persons with disabilities. We welcome feedback on the accessibility of this website.

If you have a comments or complaint about the accessibility of this website, please email us at AccessOfficer@ombudsman.ie

If you want particular content in an accessible format please include the following details:

• Your required format
• The content you wish to receive (please include the web address of the content)
• Your name and email address

We will make all reasonable efforts to fulfil your request.

Standards in Public Office Commission Access Officer

Certain ‘in-house’ services or facilities are jointly shared with the Office of the Ombudsman. Queries and complaints about accessibility are dealt with by our Access Officer, whose role is to provide or arrange for and coordinate assistance and guidance to persons with disabilities accessing the services we provide. Our Access Officer can be contacted by email at  accessofficer@ombudsman.ie or by telephone at 01 639 5625.

Enforcement procedure

For information on making a complaint please see our Complaints Protocol.