Accessibility Statement

Alcester Town Council is committed to ensuring digital accessibility for people with disabilities. We are continually improving the user experience for everyone, and applying the relevant accessibility standards.

We want as many people as possible to be able to use this website. For example, that means you should be able to:

• Change colours, contrast levels and fonts
• Zoom in up to 200% 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 (eg: NVDA (NonVisual Desktop Access))

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

Customising the website

AbilityNet has advice on making your device easier to use if you have a disability. This is an external site with suggestions to make your computer more accessible.

AbilityNet – My computer my way

With a few simple steps you can customise the appearance of our website to make it easier to read and navigate.

Display settings

In order to make our website easier to read and navigate, you can change display settings such as:

• Text size
• Colour and contrast
• Screen magnification
• Style sheets

Guidance on how to improve accessibility and customise your settings for internet browsers

Internet Explorer remains the browser most compatible with assistive software. Internet Explorer can be used without plugins, but most websites and applications no longer actively support the browser, so you may need to use an alternative. Accessibility features and customisation in Edge, Chrome, Firefox and Safari may require you to install specific plugins. This is simple and easy to do on your own device.

• Internet Explorer
• Windows Edge
• Chrome
• Firefox
• Safari

How accessible this website is

Alcester Town Council takes the following measures to ensure accessibility. However:

• Some parts may not be fully compatible with screen readers
• You may not be able to access all content by using the keyboard alone
• Not all media will have a transcript or be subtitled
• Some text may not reflow in a single column when you change the size of the browser window and at certain levels of magnification
• Some older PDF documents are not fully accessible to screen reader software

Technical information about this website’s accessibility

Alcester Town Council is committed to making its website accessible, in accordance with the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018.

Current accessibility standard of the site:

WCAG 2.1 level AA

Current content conformance status:

Partially conformant: Some parts of the content do not fully conform to the accessibility standard.

Known accessibility issues

Despite our best efforts users may experience some issues. This is a description of known accessibility issues. Please contact us if you observe an issue that is not listed.

• Not all our PDF’s and Word documents meet accessibility standards. We will be considering online training and setting up content guidelines to improve the accessibility of these documents.
• Most tooltips disappear as soon as the cursor moves. Also tooltips are not always present for all icons and images.
  1.4.13 – Content on Hover or Focus
• There may not be sufficient colour contrast between font and background colours especially where the text size is very small.
  1.4.13 – Content on Hover or Focus
• Visual information to identify user interface components, such as keyboard focus, do not always have a sufficient contrast ratio
  1.4.11 – Non-text contrast
• Not all our PDF’s and Word documents meet accessibility standards.
  • 1.1.1 – Non-text Content
  • 2.4.5 – Multiple Ways
  • 1.3.2 – Meaningful Sequence
  • 1.4.5 – Images of Text

We aim to improve our websites accessibility on a regular and continuous basis.

Content that is not within the scope of the accessibility regulations

Maps

It is unlikely that the maps used on the website are fully accessible with all assistive technologies. However maps are currently not within the scope of the 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 in a way that is 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. We will try to ensure any new PDFs or Word documents we publish will meet accessibility standards and where we find any that are not accessible we will rectify this as soon as possible.

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.

Compatibility with browsers and assistive technology

This site is designed to be compatible with the following browsers:

• Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer 11

Technologies

Accessibility of this site relies on the following technologies to work:

• HTML
• WAI-ARIA
• CSS
• Javascript
• PHP
• MYSQL

Assessment methods

Alcester Town Council assessed the accessibility of this site using the following method:

• Self-evaluation: The site was evaluated internally by the company or organisation.

Feedback process

We welcome your feedback on the accessibility of this site. Please contact us via one of the following methods:

• Phone: 01789 766084
• Email: clerk@alcester-tc.gov.uk
• Postal Address: Alcester Town Council, Globe House, Priory Road, Alcester, B49 5DZ

We aim to respond to feedback within 5 days.

Formal approval of this accessibility statement

This accessibility statement has been approved by:

Alcester Town Council

This statement was created on 16/09/2020.

Approved at Full Council 7^th November 2023

To be reviewed November 2025.