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Accessibility Statement

Using this website

This accessibility statement is for https://microsites.darlington.gov.uk/, it cover's the Local Plan and the Social Worker Recruitment elements of this website. This website is run by Darlington Borough 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 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 (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.

 

How accessible this website is

Most of this website is compliant with the W3C WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standard.  However, there are some parts of this website that are not fully accessible:

  • Some of our older pdf documents

What to do if you can’t 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’ll consider your request and get back to you in 10 working days.

Reporting accessibility problems with this website

We’re always looking to improve the accessibility of this website. If you find any problems that aren’t listed on this page or think we’re not meeting accessibility requirements, contact the Web team by emailing the issue to [email protected]

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

Darlington Borough Council is committed to making its websites 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

The content listed below is non-accessible for the following reasons.

Non compliance with the accessibility regulations

 

  • Some of the PDF's on our website are not in an accessible format due to not being machine readable or missing certain landmarks such as headers. This doesn’t meet WCAG 2.1 success criterion 4.1.2 (name, role value). Where we have created the documents we will fix these issues. Where the documents have been supplied to us by a 3rd party company we will link to an alternative source of information.

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

PDFs and other documents

Some of  older PDFs and Word documents don’t meet accessibility standards - for example, they may not be structured so they’re accessible to a screen reader. This doesn’t 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. For example, we have PDFs with information on how users can access our services, and forms published as Word documents. By September 2020, we plan to either fix these or replace them with accessible HTML pages. 

The accessibility regulations don’t require us to fix PDFs or other documents published before 23 September 2018 if they’re not essential to providing our services.  Any new PDFs or Word documents we publish will meet accessibility standards.

How we tested this website

This website is tested every 10 days. The tests are carried out by the Darlington Borough Council web team using Siteimprove’s accessibility reports.  Tests are scheduled automatically and are monitored by the web team.

What we are doing to improve accessibility

Our accessibility road map below shows how we aim to improve accessibility across this website.

Issue Target Fix Date
4.1.2 Name, Role, Value No date set

This statement was prepared on 28/04/2020 and was updated on 13/03/2024 and is reviewed every four months.