Accessibility

Website Accessibility Statement

Accessibility statement for www.sedgefieldtowncouncil.gov.uk

This website is run by Sedgefield Town 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 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 tried to make the content of our website as simple as possible to understand.

Limitations

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

  • older PDF documents may not be fully accessible to screen reader software
  • any instances of live video streams may not have captions
  • there may be limitations to how far you can zoom on images

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).

Compliance Status

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

Non compliance with the accessibility regulations:

  • Some images do not have a text alternative
  • Elements that can be navigated using a keyboard should be outlined whenever focused
  • Various elements (buttons, menus, forms, drop down lists, decorational images) require minor coding/role changes to be easily identifiable for screen readers

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

  • 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. 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.
  • 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.

What we’re doing to improve accessibility

Our website manager is now reviewing the outcomes of the latest test and altering the coding where necessary to meet the requirements.

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

We are aware that most of our documents are not accessible. Documents generally do not comply with accessibility requirements, so we are actively working on plans to avoid adding PDFs and documents wherever possible. Where there is no alternative available, any PDF that are included will be as made accessible as possible.

What to do if you cannot access parts of this website

If you need information on this website in a different format, please get in touch via

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, we would appreciate if you could get in touch with us with as much information e.g. pages, links and imagery concerned.

 

Published 22nd October 2015

Last Tested 21st January 2025

Last Updated 21st January 2025

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