Accessibility

Accessibility statement for the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission.

This accessibility statement applies to www.nihrc.org

This website is run by the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission.

The Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission website includes BrowseAloud accessibility software. BrowseAloud adds speech, reading and translation support tools to online content. It works on all major browsers and platforms, including mobile phones and tablets. All features are accessed from an easy-to-use floating toolbar located at the top right menu on all web pages.

Every effort has been made to make this website accessible as possible.

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

• Most older PDF documents are not fully accessible to screen reader software.
• Live video streams do not have captions.
• Some of our pages contain content from systems provided by an external supplier, including our cookie consent management platform, CookieFirst.

We are always looking to improve the accessibility of this website.

If you find any problems that are not listed on this page or think we’re not meeting the requirements of the accessibility regulations, please get in touch via info@nihrc.org

The Equality Commission for Northern Ireland (ECNI) is responsible for enforcing the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018 (the ‘accessibility regulations’) in Northern Ireland. 

If you’re not happy with how we respond to your request or complaint, please call ECNI on 028 9050 0600 and ask to speak with one of their Discrimination Advice Officers in their Legal Division, or email information@equalityni.org. Find out more about the enforcement procedure.

The Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission is committed to making its website accessible, in accordance with the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018.

Non-compliance with the accessibility regulations

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

• Some images within documents do not have a text alternative, so people using a screen reader cannot access the information. Some images within documents use alt text which is the image file name. This fails WCAG 2.2 success criterion 1.1.1 (non-text content).
• Some Word documents contain a non-inline graphic or object. This fails WCAG 2.2 success criterion 1.3.2 (meaningful sequence).
• Some of our documents do not have descriptive titles that describe the topic or purpose of that document / page. This fails WCAG 2.2 success criterion 2.4.2 (Page Titled).
• At 200% zoom, the link for "Dac" at the bottom of the webpage is obscured by the cookie banner when it receives keyboard focus. More
  focused elements become hidden from view if the site is viewed at 400% zoom At 200% and 400% zoom, when the hamburger menu is open, the keyboard focus can move to the page content behind it if the user tabs away from the menu. This fails WCAG 2.2 succwess criterion 2.4.11 (Focus Not Obscured).

PDFs and other documents

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.

Any new PDFs or Word documents we publish will meet accessibility standards.

Live video

We do not plan to add captions to live video streams because live video is exempt from meeting the accessibility regulations.

Third Party Content/Platforms

The NIHRC website contains some content that is externally embedded or integrated, such as YouTube media player and cookie consent management platform, CookieFirst. This is third-party content that is neither funded nor developed by, nor under the control of, the public sector body.

Within CookieFirst:

• The list structure was not properly represented to screen reader users.

• Expandable content is not marked up properly.

• Some content is not accessible to users via keyboard interface.

• There are issues with table structure

• The movement of the icon could be distracting.

• The cookie banner could pose barriers to users navigating via keyboard interface.

Where resource allows, we do our best to make this content as accessible as possible (for example, by making sure any video we upload to YouTube has appropriate subtitled, captions and audio description). However, we do not have influence over the accessibility of the platform itself (for example, the YouTube video player functionality). We will continue to investigate alternative media players.

A high standard of quality control was conducted to ensure usability, accessibility and functionality ​of the new NIHRC website.

We adhere to ​industry guidelines for accessibility​ which include text equivalents for multimedia, captions, non-colour availability, appropriate colour contrasts and frequency regulations. Both a mix of manual checking by expert developers and automated software to fully scan the website for accessibility problems was used.

This statement was prepared on 10th March 2021.

It was last reviewed on 19th June 2026.

This website was last tested on 18th May 2026 by the Digital Accessibility Centre.

This audit approach sampled a number of pages to test which included some of the most visited web pages, online forms and pages with differing types of content.

The audit reports are available on request at info@nihrc.org

Our website support company Green17 is implementing accessibility fixes based on the audit report.

This statement will be reviewed and updated on an ongoing basis.