Accessibility statement for Hilmarton Parish Council 

This website is run by Hilmarton 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 up to 300% 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

We’ve also made the website text as simple as possible to understand.

AbilityNet 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:

• most older PDF documents are not fully accessible to screen reader software
• Some of the <a> tags do not contain an href attribute
• There are some duplicate Ids on our Diary page

What to do if you cannot access parts of this website

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

• email jacquie88@btinternet.com (Parish clerk)
• call 01249 760401

We’ll consider your request and get back to you in 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, contact: jacquie88@btinternet.com giving the page title and the nature of the problem.

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

Hilmarton 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

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

Non compliance with the accessibility regulations

There may be some images that 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 2020. When we publish new content we’ll make sure our use of images meets accessibility standards.

Navigation and accessing information

The image carousel we use has some <a> elements that do not have a href attribute which may be confusing to people using the website with a screen reader. This carousel is a third party application that’s functionality we do not have control over, however the carousel has all the relevant image labelling and ARIA information to describe what it is displaying and the <a> elements text values reflect their purpose

Duplicate Ids

There are duplicate Ids on our Diary page which fails WCAG 2.1 Success Criterion 4.1.1: (Parsing)
This is another third party plugin we are using to display our Diary Events.

This was not picked up in the initial assessment we did probably due to the calendar being rendered after the page had loaded

This is invalid HTML and we are aware of this, we plan to contact the plugin developer by 23rd September 2020 to make them aware of this

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

PDFs and other documents

Many 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 services. For example, we have PDFs with information on how users can access our services, and forms published as Word 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.

How we tested this website

This website was last tested on 21st July 2020. The test was carried out by ourselves

We tested the Homepage and several other templates including the Parish councilors page, the contact page and Diary page. Common instances of failure when we carried out the assessment were colour contrast ratios and image alt text. We set about correcting the colour contrast issues by identifying and updating our colours in the stylesheet and the alt text has now been included on each image in our Media Library

What we’re doing to improve accessibility

This statement was prepared on 06 September 2020. We plan to update it in due course hopefully with our correspondence from the third party apps we use regarding the issues discussed above