Our website is the Parish Council’s main way of meeting our statutory obligations of providing information on our activities to the public. Over the past eighteen months we have been extending the site to cover all aspects of our business. We now need to ensure that the website is fully accessible i.e. making sure it can be used by as many people as possible, and for this we would like your help.
Accessibility includes people with:
- impaired vision,
- motor difficulties,
- cognitive impairments or learning disabilities,
- deafness or impaired hearing.
Accessibility means more than just putting things online. It means making our content and design clear and simple enough so that most people can use it without needing to adapt it, while supporting those who do need to adapt things. For example, someone with impaired vision might use a screen reader (software that lets a user navigate a website and ‘read out’ the content), braille display or screen magnifier. Or someone with motor difficulties might use a special mouse, speech recognition software or on-screen keyboard emulator.
New regulations came into force for public sector bodies like ours on 23 September 2018. The regulations say you must make your website more accessible by making it ‘perceivable, operable, understandable and robust’. The full name of the regulations is the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018.
Our website will meet the new legal requirements if we:
- meet the international WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standard – although there are valid legal reasons for not meeting accessibility standards,
- publish an accessibility statement that explains how accessible your website is.
As our website was published before 23 September 2018, we need to comply with the 2018 regulations by 23 September 2020. From January 2020, the Government Digital Service (GDS) will monitor public sector bodies’ compliance on behalf of the Minister for the Cabinet Office.
As a start to meeting the requirements, we have introduced an accessibility toolbar, activated by the wheelchair icon on the right side of the screen, that provides a range of options for font manipulation, background colours and contrast etc. We have also drafted an accessibility statement, which can be read from the accessibility toolbar or in the footer section of each page.
We also know that there are some aspects of the site that do not meet the requirements and we will be working over the next few months to rectify the failings, where possible. We would also like you to tell us where any part of the website is difficult to follow, from any perspective. Please use the Contact Us form to tell us of any shortcomings.
