Great Maplestead Parish Council is committed to ensuring digital accessibility to its website for people with disabilities by ensuring it conforms to the relevant accessibility standards.
Conformance Status
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1 define the requirements for designers and developers to improve accessibility for people with disabilities. The guidelines define three levels of conformance: Level A, Level AA, and Level AAA. The Council’s website is partially conformant with WCAG 2.1 Level AA.
Partial conformity means that some elements do not fully meet the full Level AA accessibility standard. Most of the non-conformance elements are inherent in the set-up of the website’s hosting platform (e-voice) and, although the Council is able to amend the content over which it has control, it cannot alter any non-conforming elements that fall outside of its administrative privileges.
The site’s user content is uploaded by Council members, who do not have web development experience. Although they try to ensure that all content and links are fully accessible, occasional errors may happen. If you notice something that you think may be an error, please contact the Clerk.
Feedback
Feedback on the website’s accessibility is welcomed; please let the Parish Clerk know if you find any errors or barriers to accessibility.
Email: anncrisp@greatmaplesteadpc.co.uk
Phone: 01787 460 216
Compatibility with Browsers and Assistive Technology
This site is designed to be compatible with the following assistive technologies:
- Mobile phones
- PC and Mac computers
- All known browsers
- Screen readers
Technical Specifications
This site’s accessibility relies on the following technologies to work with the particular combination of web browser and any assistive technologies or plugins installed on your computer:
- HTML
- CSS
- JavaScript
These technologies are relied upon for conformance with the accessibility standards used.
Limitations and Alternatives
Although the Council has tried to ensure the best possible accessibility to its website, there may be some limitations; the known ones are listed below – please contact the Clerk if you find an issue that is not listed:
- The main menu does not have AccessKey functionality for all items (this is an issue with the HTML coding on the e-voice platform)
- The sub-menu items for the news items do not provide a 'previous' or 'next' option for those using only a keyboard to navigate within these elements (this is also an HTML coding issue with e-voice)
- A small number of PDFs may not be able to be read by screen readers. The accessibility guidelines do not require PDFs or other documents published before 23 September 2018 to be made accessible if they’re not essential to providing current Council services – for example, historical Agenda, Minutes or Finance related documents. Should you wish to access such information, please contact the Clerk with details of the document you require so that arrangements can be made for it to be sent to you in an alternative format.
- The 'grey on white' text used at the foot of the page to login, request membership of the site and access the search menu does not have sufficient colour difference to assist those with visual impairments (this element is controlled via the e-voice system and the Council is not able to adjust it). However, membership of the site is not needed for users to access its contents and the login functionality is only required for the site administrators.
The Council believes that any work required to fix other issues concerning site navigation and the accessing of certain information, interactive tools and transactions would impose a disproportionate burden on it within the meaning of the guidelines.
Further accessibility assessments will be made if and when e-voice updates the hosting platform.
Assessment Approach
Great Maplestead Parish Council has assessed the accessibility of this site by self-evaluation using various online WCAG testing tools.