Website Accessibility Statement for Rushmere St Andrew Parish Council

This website is run by Rushmere St Andrew 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:

  • change contrast levels and fonts
  • zoom in up to 300% without 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 have 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:

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:

We will consider your request and get back to you in 31 days.

Reporting accessibility problems with this website

We are 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: The Parish Clerk at sylvia.stannard@rushmere-st-andrew.org.uk or Assistant Clerk sarah.jenkins@rushmere-st-andrew.org.uk and they can help you out with this query.

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 are not happy with how we respond to your complaint, contact the Equality Advisory and Support Service (EASS).

Technical information about this website’s accessibility

Rushmere St Andrew 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.

Non-compliance with the accessibility regulations

PDF’s and other documents

Many of our older PDFs and Word documents do not meet accessibility standards – for example, they may be structures, so they are accessible to a screen reader. This does not meet WCAG 2.1 success criteria 4.1.2.

Some of our PDFs and Word documents are essential to providing our services. For example, we have PDFs detailing the minutes of Parish Council Meetings.

The accessibility regulations do not require us to fix PDFs or other documents published before 23 September 2018 if they are not essential to providing our services. For example, we do not plan to fix historical minutes of Council meetings. Any new PDFs or Word documents we publish will meet accessibility standards.

Images

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

We plan to add text alternatives for all images by September 2021. When we publish new content, we will make sure our use of images meets accessibility standards.

Disproportionate Burden

PDFs and other documents

The accessibility regulations do not require us to fix PDFs or other documents published before 23 September 2018 if they are not essential to providing our services. For example, we do not plan to fix historical minutes of Council meetings. Long term we will undertake to invesitigate a way to replace the use of PDFs or Word documents we publish to meet accessibility standards, but for the present we have assessed the cost of the time and expense of fixing the issues, we believe would be a disproportionate burden within the meaning of the accessability regulations. 

Images

We plan to add text alternatives for all historic and current images essential to providing our services meets accessibility standards by January 2021. For example, Councillors contact details. When we publish new content, we will make sure our use of images meets accessibility standards. We have assessed the cost of the time of fixing the issues prior to January 2021 and we believe that doing so would be a disproportionate burden within the meaning of the accessability regulations. 

How we tested this website

This website was last tested on [22/09/2020]. The test was carried out by Rushmere St Andrew Parish Council. The test was performed using the Wave Accessibility software.

We tested:

What we are doing to improve accessibility

We are constantly looking at our website accessibility alongside our website developers and where we can improve on it, we will. We follow a specific set of guidelines to ensure all our content meets the WCAG 2.1 Standard.

This statement was prepared on [22/09/2020]. It was last updated on [22/09/2020].