FLAXTON PARISH COUNCIL WEBSITE ACCESSIBILITY STATEMENT

 

Introduction and Background

This website www.flaxtonpc.org.uk is run by Flaxton Parish Council in conjunction with our supplier BWP Creative Limited.

Flaxton Parish Council is committed to providing a website that is accessible to the widest possible audience, regardless of technology or ability. We are actively working with our supplier, members, and employee to increase the accessibility and usability of our website and in doing so adhere to many of the available standards and guidelines.

Making a website or mobile app accessible means making sure it can be used by as many people as possible.  This includes those with:

• impaired vision
• motor difficulties
• cognitive impairments or learning disabilities
• deafness or impaired hearing

You should be able to:

• change colours, contrast levels and fonts
• 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 (including the most recent versions of JAWS, NVDA and VoiceOver)

AbilityNet has advice on making your device easier to use if you have a disability.

To meet government accessibility requirements, public sector websites must:

• meet level AA of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1)as a minimum
• work on the most commonly used assistive technologies– including screen magnifiers, screen readers and speech recognition tools

The full name of the new regulations is the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018.

You can find out more about the Accessibility Regulations by reading the latest guidance.

 Accessibility Statement

Our website is partially compliant with the Web Content Accessibility WCAG 2.1 Guidelines.

It has been tested using the WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool which checks web pages for conformance to the main WCAG requirements and proposes changes where issues are identified.  You can review the WAVE Evaluation Tool.

Where possible all WAVE accessibility errors have been corrected with a few minor exceptions noted later.

All WAVE reported accessibility warnings have been analysed and the ones we consider to be material have been resolved.  Some warnings relate to the use of PDFs to store documents such as agendas, minutes, policies, and procedures.

The content of these PDFs cannot be directly checked for accessibility by WAVE.  However, we produce most of our documents using Microsoft Word.  Before we convert them to PDF, we now check them using the Microsoft Accessibility Checker and correct any accessibility errors raised.

All PDF documents can be downloaded from our website and saved for access by a user’s preferred screen reader.

To enhance accessibility the website uses the UserWay accessibility ‘widget’ which is displayed as a default at the lower left corner of the screen.  Its functions and purpose are described in the next section.

Figure 1 – The UserWay Accessibility Widget

UserWay works alongside the website and provides assists for:

• Keyboard Navigation without a mouse
• Reading Pages Aloud
• Changing Screen Contrast Levels
• Highlighting Links on a Page
• Displaying Bigger Text
• Wider Spacing between Characters
• Stopping Animations
• Changing fonts to make them more friendly towards people with Dyslexia
• Making Stylised fonts readable
• Increasing Cursor Size
• Understanding the structure of a web page
• Moving the UserWay widget to a different screen position

UserWay Accessibility Functions

The UserWay Accessibility Widget can be accessed via a mouse or CTRL+U from the keyboard which presents the accessibility menu.

 

 

Figure 2 – The UserWay Accessibility Menu

Each of the key UserWay functions is described below.

Keyboard Navigation

The Keyboard Navigation function allows you to navigate most of the website using just a keyboard.  A focus outline is placed around the current focused element on the screen.  The focus outline colour can be changed based on the Contrast+ setting.

A ‘skip’ link has been placed in the Website Heading Menu which allows you to navigate directly to the main page content using the Enter key when altered by the Quick Accessibility Menu.

Figure 3 – The UserWay Quick Accessibility Menu

When the skip option is shown a user can also choose to select the visually impaired accessibility option which increases the text and line spacing, highlights all links on the page and increases the size of the cursor.

Read Page (Aloud)

The Read Page function will read the contents of a website page aloud.  You can also control the speed of the speech with three options:

1. Normal
2. Fast
3. Slow

Contrast Levels

The Contrast+ function allows the page contrast to be changed with five contrast options:

1. Normal
2. Invert colours
3. Dark contrast
4. Light contrast
5. Desaturated

Highlight Links

The Highlight Links function shows all links on a web page to assist with navigation.

Bigger Text

The Bigger Text function allows the size of the text on the screen to be increased in four increments.

Text Spacing

The spacing between individual text characters and between text lines can be modified between:

1. Normal
2. Light
3. Moderate
4. Heavy

Stop Animations

The Stop Animations function allows any blinking or flashing content to be paused.  An automated slide show is the only moving content that has been implemented on the website to date.

Dyslexia Friendly

The Dyslexia Friendly function enhances readability for those with Dyslexia and provides them with a fluid reading experience that is tailored to their needs.  Symbols and lowercase letters that can easily be confused, such as l, i and 1 are modified to improve their clarity.

Legible Fonts

The Legible Fonts function converts stylised fonts such as Gothic into accessible fonts and font weights.  Note that we try to avoid using stylised fonts on the website.

Cursor and Horizontal Reading Guide

The Cursor function allows the size of the cursor to be increased in a single increment.

A second increment on the Cursor function provides a horizontal reading guide (in addition to a larger cursor).

Tooltips

The Tooltips function shows alternative text and aria field labels for on-screen elements, which would otherwise be hidden, with a simple mouse hover.

Move/Hide

The Move/Hide function allows a user to hide the UserWay Widget or move its position to eight different positions around the webpage.

Page Structure

The Page Structure function provides information about the Headers, Landmarks and Links on a web page.  A user can select the relevant section or link directly from this Menu.

Figure 4 – Page Structure Headers Tab

The Page Structure Links Tab provides links to every webpage on the site.

Figure 5 – Page Structure Links Tab

Reset All

The Reset All function turns all the UserWay accessibility features off.

How Accessible Is This Website?

We know that some parts of this website are not fully compliant with accessibility requirements:

• There are missing form labels on the “Contact the Council” and “Contact the Community” Forms.
• There are missing form labels on the “COVID Community Weekly Deliveries” and “Community Chat” Forms.
• There are several areas where we believe we could improve keyboard only navigation.
• We have many links to other websites, mainly Public Sector ones, which are outside of our control.  These may not provide the same level of accessibility as ours.

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 please contact the Parish Clerk via the details shown on the Contact Us Page.

We will consider your request and get back to you within 14 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 are not meeting accessibility requirements, contact the Parish Clerk via the details shown on the Contact Us Page.

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

Flaxton 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

Having carried out the tests described in the next section we are not aware of any specific areas of the website which are not accessible.

How We Tested This Website

The Council does not have the financial resources required to pay for an independent accessibility review. Therefore, the test was carried out by the Council in conjunction with the website provider.

This website was first tested in early May 2020 over a period of around six weeks.

We used the WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool (WAET) which checks web pages for conformance to the main WCAG requirements and proposes changes to resolve issues when they are identified.  We adopted an iterative approach to the review in which:

1)     We first identified all the accessibility issues for all 50 web pages using the WAET.  An example of WAET page level summary output is shown in the figure below.

Figure 6 – Example WAET Summary Output for Home Page

2)     The issues were then reviewed and prioritised for correction.

1. “Errors” or “Contrast Issues” were top priority (initially over 2,000) now reduced to only four affecting two web pages.
2. “Alerts” (Warnings) were second priority as not all were material to the accessibility of the site.  For example, WAET cannot view the accessibility of the many PDFs that are present on the website so raises an alert to check them separately.
3. We eliminated key Alerts such as missing Heading Levels and meaningless link names.
4. A significant number of ‘Redundant Text’ and ‘Broken Link’ alerts remain but these are not material and relate to missing link names in the popular photo gallery pages which by their nature cannot be accessed by users with impaired eyesight (though there are captions that can be read aloud by screen readers).
5. The links on the ‘breadcrumbs’ at the top of each page to aid navigation of the site raise a ‘Redundant Link Text’ alert.  We do not consider this to be material.
6. We are carrying out a separate exercise to check the accessibility of all PDFs before deciding how to tackle any issues reported.

3)     Possible solutions were identified for each issue and responsibility was allocated for resolution between the council and supplier(s).

4)     The changes were implemented and retested using WAET on the test website.

5)     When successful the changes were applied to the production website and re-tested using WAET.

6)     We then navigated several areas of the Website using only a keyboard and could not identify any inaccessible content.

7)     We used a trial version of Speech Recognition Anywhere to confirm that the website can be navigated using speech recognition software.

What Are We Doing To Improve Accessibility?

A handful of important alerts (<10) are being reviewed in conjunction with our website supplier as they are beyond the council’s direct control.  These include skipped heading levels and missing field set headings which we cannot correct ourselves.  Our supplier may need ‘plugins’ to be modified by their third-party suppliers or to use alternative more accessible plugins.

We are in the process of re-checking the accessibility of all PDFs that have been loaded.

We are documenting the processes and procedures for checking accessibility of new content and pages before they are made live on the website.  This includes updating the Word document templates which we use for standard documents such as policies and procedures, agenda, minutes, and financial publications.

You can download a PDF copy of our FPC_Accessibility_Statement.

Revised Version Published 16th October 2020