Accessibility Statement

ASH PARISH COUNCIL WEBSITE ACCESSIBILITY STATEMENT

ACCESSIBILITY STATEMENT

This website is run by Ash Parish Council. We want as many people as possible to be able to use this website. For example, that means you should be able to:

  • zoom in without the text spilling off the screen
  • 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)

We’ve designed this site with accessibility in mind. Some of the general features include:

  • The use of clear, simple language which is easy to understand.
  • The use of common web conventions.
  • Avoiding the use of blinking or flickering elements.
  • The site uses cascading style sheets (CSS) for visual layout. Where possible, we’ve also made our website navigable, usable and readable if your browsing device does not support style sheets
  • Navigate most of the website using just a keyboard
  • Careful use of text colours, size and background colours to help people with a range of visual impairments. Our site is usable by anyone with colour deficient vision. We’ve checked the site’s font and background colour to ensure there are no combinations against the different colour blindness conditions and ensured that all information is still clear.
  • We’ve designed all pages on our website so that all information that is conveyed with colour is also available without colour.
  • We’ve made it possible to use our site without having to view graphics or images. All non-text elements, such as images, animations, symbols, audio, video and multimedia have text equivalents. We’ve done this by providing descriptive alt attributes for them. Purely decorative graphics or formatting images have empty alt attributes.
  • We’ve made navigation links consistent between pages throughout the site
  • Placed page items in a logical order and making the website easy to navigate helps people with visual impairments, motor deficiencies and cognitive disabilities.
  • Our website does not use pop-up windows unless they are appropriate. Acceptable cases, for example, are when it is important to see the browser window you’ve just navigated from in the background.
  • Forms and tables are clearly labelled to help readers to understand the content on a page and to fill in content into correct form fields.
  • While we’ve used clear, legible font for all text and headings. In the Firefox browser you can select View, then Text Size, and then choose increase, or decrease the font size.  AbilityNet also has advice on making your device easier to use if you have a disability.

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

  • you cannot modify the line height or spacing of text
  • most older PDF documents are not fully accessible to screen reader software
  • live video streams may not have captions
  • you cannot skip to the main content when using a screen reader
  • some of our code does not pass the w3c validation checker

What to do if you cannot access parts of this website
If you need information on this website in a different format: such as a hard copy,  you can use our contact us form on our main menu at the top of most pages, or email ashvillagewebsite@gmail.com  We’ll consider your request and get back to you within 10 working days.

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, you can use our contact us form on our main menu at the top of most pages, or email ashvillagewebsite@gmail.com

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

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

Non accessible content
Some images do not have a text alternative, so people using a screen reader cannot access the information. This fails WCAG 2.1 success criterion 1.1.1 (non-text content).

We plan to add text alternatives for all images by September 2025.  When we publish new content we’ll make sure our use of images meets accessibility standards.

Navigation and accessing information
There’s no way to skip the repeated content in the page header (for example, a ‘skip to main content’ option). This fails WCAG 2.1 success criterion 2.4.1 (bypass blocks).

It’s not possible for users to change text size above 250% without some of the content overlapping. This fails WCAG 2.1 success criterion 1.4.4 (resize text).

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

PDFs and other documents
Some of our older PDFs and Word documents do not meet accessibility standards – for example, they may not be structured so they’re accessible to a screen reader. This does not meet WCAG 2.1 success criterion 4.1.2 (name, role value).

Some of our PDFs and Word documents are essential to providing our information. For example, we have PDFs with information on how users can access our information, and forms published as Word documents. By September 2025, we plan to either fix these or replace them with accessible HTML pages.

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
Live video streams do not have captions. This fails WCAG 2.1 success criterion 1.2.4 (captions – live).

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

How we tested this website
The site is automatically tested each month using Siteimprove. This is a third-party platform to test the accessibility quality and usability of the site.

We test: our main website platform, available at ashpcsomerset.com

What we’re doing to improve accessibility
We plan to improve accessibility on this website by:

  • regularly monitoring the accessibility of our website
  • making our PDF documents (created after 22 September 2018) as accessible as possible
  • where possible, creating HTML pages rather than PDF documents
  • The accessibility regulations don’t require us to fix PDFs or other documents published before 23 September 2018 if they’re not essential to providing our services but any new PDFs or Word documents we publish will meet accessibility standards.

Ash Parish Council is committed to making its website accessible, in accordance with the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018.
and this website is partially compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1 AA standard. However, the council have assessed the cost of fixing the non-compliant issues and we believe that doing so would be a disproportionate burden within the meaning of the accessibility regulations.

We used an accessibility checker to test the pages across our main website platform at ashpcsomerset.com  The website was last tested using Siteimprove on 28.01.2024 and the test was carried out internally.

This statement was prepared on 30th January 2020. It was last updated on 30th January 2024.