Statement for Kingsmead Parish Council
(www.kingsmeadpc.org.uk)

This accessibility statement refers to the website that is published and maintained by Kingsmead Parish Council.

Kingsmead 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 commitment applies to all visitors regardless of their ability, disability, or general awareness of using the internet.  We have made use of plain English so that the website text is as simple as possible.  However, no single solution meets the needs of all users and trying to improve the site for one disability can influence our ability to meet the needs of another section of our audience.

While we work to achieve all World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Version 2.0 ‘Double A’ standard as a minimum, sometimes we may not quite be able to achieve those standards on some of the pages.

Additional information can be found here: World Wide Web Consortium (WC3).

Additional information on making your device easier to use can be found at AbilityNet and the following websites provide further accessibility information for your web browser.

• BBC (My web my way)
• Gov.uk

Help with downloads

This website sometimes uses files that require an extra programme or application to open and access.  In most cases this software, is already supplied with new computers.  We only use document formats that can be opened using a free reader that you can download by following the links on this page.

Some documents on this website were produced in Microsoft packages such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.  There is no need to buy the software as free viewers are available from the Microsoft website.

• Microsoft Word Viewer
• Excel Viewer
• PowerPoint Viewer

Other files held on this website are in Adobe PDF format, which means you will need appropriate software to view them.

The Adobe Acrobat Reader allows you to view, navigate, and print PDF files across all major computing platforms.  PDF stands for Portable Document Format and means a document that can be viewed or printed out on any platform, whether Windows, Macintosh, or Linux.

To download Adobe Acrobat Reader, visit the Adobe Acrobat website using the following link: Adobe Acrobat Reader

PDF files and accessibility

We try to ensure that the information in the PDF content is made accessible to all our users by enriching it with PDF tags.  This means the PDF-based documents can be accessed and read by screen readers.  However, occasionally, it is impossible to make PDF documents as accessible as we would like, for example in the case of PDFs containing imagery such as maps or diagrams.  Where PDF documents are imaged based, it is impossible to make the document fully accessible.  In those instances, we will endeavour to offer an alternative solution, although this may not always be possible.

Help with hearing the website

ReadSpeaker ProReader is a web service that reads aloud the text content on a website.

On the ‘Settings’ page you can choose how you want it to work.  You can have the text that is read displayed in the window, select text size, colour, and make other changes on how the text is shown.

It is also possible to make ProReader highlight the text as it reads on a word-by-word basis, sentence-by-sentence basis, or both.  Support for JavaScript must be switched on for the highlighting function to work.

What to do if you cannot access parts of this website

We are always aiming to improve the accessibility of this website.

If you encounter any accessibility problems or believe we are not meeting accessibility requirements, or if you require information on this website in a different format such as accessible PDF, large print, easy read, audio recording for example, please use the contact details below.  While we will always strive to fulfil your request, we cannot guarantee the required format will be available.  We will always aim to respond to any contact within 15 working days.

Contact Us

Wendy Maddock – Clerk & Responsible Financial Officer

Email: clerk@kingsmeadpc.org.uk

Additional Information

Statement Details

This statement was prepared on 12th August 2020.  It was last reviewed on 15th September 2020.

This website was last tested on 10th September 2020 and the tests were performed by Kingsmead Parish Council.

How we tested this website

All pages on this website are in scope for testing against the accessibility criteria and were tested both manually and automatically prior to the writing of this statement utilising the WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool.

Compliance status

This website is partially compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1 AA standard as it meets most requirements of the WCAG 2.1 AA standard.  This will be due to the following:

• an exemption – inaccessible content is out of scope of the regulations

Content that is not within the scope of the accessibility regulations

PDFs and other documents

Some of our PDFs and Word documents are used to provide our services.  For example, we have PDFs recording council activities and meeting agendas and minutes.  Not all of these documents are correctly tagged.  By 31st December 2020, we plan to either fix these or replace them with accessible HTML pages.

Any new PDFs or Word documents we publish will meet accessibility standards.

Note that 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.

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).