Cookie Consent by Privacy Policies Generator website

Accessibility policy/statement

Using this website

This accessibility statement applies to https://www.darlington.gov.uk. 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 [external link] 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:

  • pages with Google Maps
  • most of our older pdf documents
  • some of our older online forms are hard to navigate with just a keyboard

Feedback and contact information

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) [external link].

Technical information about this website’s accessibility

Darlington Borough 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 [external link] AA standard, due to the non-compliances and exemptions listed below.

Non-accessible content

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

Tables with complex headers do not map correctly 

No data cells assigned to table header - Tables with multi row headers do not map their header cells to data cells correctly. This is not compliant with Success Criterion 1.3.1: Information and relationships. This is a bug in the current CMS which will be resolved in the upgrade scheduled for later this year.

Non-compliance with the accessibility regulations

PDFs and Other Documents

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).

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

Older PDFs and other documents

Many of our 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 2023, 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 [external link] if they’re not essential to providing our services. For example, we don’t plan to fix old issues of the One Darlington magazine. 

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

Maps

Most of our interactive maps are provided by Google. The images they use have no alt attribute (1.1.1 Non-text Content). Where this is the case we will make sure that address or location data that is presented on the map is available as text within that web page. 

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[external link] 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.

Accessibility issues and targets for fixes
Issue Target Fix Date
4.1.2 (name, role value) Summer 2024
1.3.1 (Information and relationships) Summer 2024

 

Preparation of this accessibility statement

This statement was prepared on 02/08/2019.  It was last update on 09/08/2023 and is updated monthly.

Install our web app.
https://www.darlington.gov.uk/about-this-website/accessibility/
www.darlington.gov.uk
CC-MAIN-2023-40
80344
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:ZLYPKCYVMR32L2PEJFXTVJICABOGBQG2
<urn:uuid:eb8f08d3-45d1-4f74-95e4-6207ce2bd11d>
2023-09-26T02:58:32Z
104.19.146.54
text/html
sha1:ZEDNDXBGSIP7DLHHHKZUE42JF2HHRJ5J
<urn:uuid:48dfac70-3042-444c-b8b1-2ace16ab46c2>
https://www.darlington.gov.uk/about-this-website/accessibility/
response
<urn:uuid:9f3d2bde-ed76-4161-a070-47a0ab966106>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2023-40
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for September/October 2023
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-200
software: Apache Nutch 1.19 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.5-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/