Accessibility statement

This accessibility statement applies to content published on the infrastructure.planninginspectorate.gov.uk domain.

This website is run by the Planning Inspectorate. We want as many people as possible to be able to use this website. You should be able to:

  • zoom in up to 300% without problems
  • change colours, contrast levels and fonts
  • navigate most of the website using just a keyboard
  • navigate most of the website using speech recognition software
  • listen to most of the website using a screen reader (including the most recent versions of JAWS, NVDA and VoiceOver

How accessible this website is

Some parts of this website are not fully accessible:

  • The site uses iframes to embed google maps and Youtube embedded videos on some pages. The tab order is not always logical on these and there are also some contrast issues.

The compliance status section below gives more detail on the areas of the site that are not fully accessible.

Feedback and contact information

If you need information on this website in a different format like accessible PDF, large print, easy read, audio recording or braille:

We’ll consider your request and get back to you in 10 working days.

If you cannot view the map on our Contact page, call us on 0303 444 5000 or email us at [email protected] for directions.

Reporting accessibility problems with this website

We’re always looking to improve the accessibility of this website. If you find any problems not listed on this page or think we’re not meeting accessibility requirements, please email us at [email protected]

Enforcement procedure

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) is responsible for enforcing the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (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).

Technical information about this website’s accessibility

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

Compliance status

This website is partially compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1 AA standard, due to the non-compliances and exemptions listed below.

Non-accessible content

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

Non-compliance with the accessibility regulations

The site uses iframes to embed google maps and Youtube videos on some pages. The tab order is not always logical on these and there are also some contrast issues.

The majority of documents we publish on this site are produced by third parties. We are not able to make these fully compliant, for example adding alternative text to images or diagrams. This doesn’t meet WCAG 2.1 success criterion 1.1.1 (non-text content).

Content that’s not within the scope of the accessibility regulations

Some of our older documents don’t meet accessibility standards. For example, they:

  • do not contain alternative text for diagrams and/or images – this does not meet WCAG 2.1 success criterion 1.1.1
  • use images of text, rather than plain text – this does not meet WCAG 2.1 success criterion 1.4.5
  • are not structured properly – this does not meet WCAG 2.1 success criterion 4.1.2

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 documents that we author and publish should meet the accessibility standards.

All video content currently published to the website will include closed captioning subtitles.   

What we’re doing to improve accessibility

The audit of the site in May 2020 identified 30 issues with the structure of the site and the HTML content.  Updates to the site have resolved these aside from the exceptions listed in the non-compliance section above.  The latest release in February 2021 replaced the calendar based view of examination stage events across all projects with an accessible version.

Preparation of this accessibility statement

This statement was prepared on 14 September 2020. It was last reviewed on 8 February 2020.

This website was last tested on 20 August 2020. The test was carried out by Zoonou.

We used an extensive structured sample of the site covering all the main templates.