Accessibility statement

This accessibility statement applies to www.harborough.gov.uk

Harborough District Council is committed to making our website accessible, inclusive and user friendly to the widest possible audience, regardless of disability, capability or technology, including users accessing our website with mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets.

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

  • change colours, contrast levels and fonts
  • zoom in up to 300% without the text spilling off the screen
  • navigate most of our website using just a keyboard
  • navigate most of our website using speech recognition software
  • listen to most of our website using a screen reader
  • read captions in videos we publish on YouTube

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

Useful help and guidance

AbilityNet provides guidance about how to:

How accessible our website is

We know some parts of our website are not fully accessible:

  • older PDF documents are not fully accessible to screen reader software
  • archive news items may contain images without appropriate descriptions

What to do if you cannot access parts of our website

If you need information on our website in a different format, such as large print, easy read, audio recording or braille, you can make a request online  or email Customer Services . 

Our offices have audio induction loops, or if you contact us before your visit we can arrange a British Sign Language (BSL) interpreter.

Reporting accessibility problems with this website

We are always looking to improve the accessibility of our website. If you find any problems that are not listed on this page or think we are not meeting the requirements of the accessibility regulations, please complete our form to let us know.

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 are not happy with how we respond to your accessibility report, contact the Equality Advisory and Support Service (EASS) .

Technical information about the accessibility of our website

Harborough District 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 (WCAG) version 2.1 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.

Non-compliance with the accessibility regulations

Some images do not have a text alternative, so people using a screen reader cannot access the information. This fails WCAG 2.1 success criterion 1.1.1 (non-text content). We plan to add text alternatives for all images by September 2020. When we publish new content, we will make sure our use of images meets accessibility standards.

Some information on our website is available in PDF files, rather than as web pages. Some of these PDF files are not accessible to screen readers. This fails WCAG 2.1 success criterion 1.1.1 (non-text content). We plan to publish accessible alternatives to PDF files (for example, electronic forms and HTML information pages) by September 2021. New PDF content will be compliant with accessibility standards.

Disproportionate burden

Our audio recordings of Council meetings do not have transcripts. We have assessed the cost of fixing these issues. We believe that doing so now would be a disproportionate burden (legislation.gov.uk) within the meaning of the accessibility regulations. This assessment is part of the annual audit of our website accessibility.

Content not within the scope of the accessibility regulations

Online maps

Online maps, for example maps published in My Harborough . We also publish textual equivalents of information relating to services and facilities.

PDFs and other documents

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. For example, we do not plan to fix archival records of meetings.

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. Work to replace them with accessible HTML pages is ongoing.

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

Live video

We do not plan to add captions to live video streams because live video is exempt from meeting the accessibility regulations.

Third party applications

We require that any new third party systems we commission for the website are Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 AA compliant. However, third party applications are partly or wholly out of our control and so may not conform to the same levels of accessibility as the rest of the website. Third party applications include:

What we are doing to improve accessibility

Our work to improve accessibility of our website includes:

  • Minimising the use of PDF and DOC downloads, replacing these downloads with online forms and accessible HTML pages wherever possible.
  • Making sure new content is compliant with accessibility guidelines by assessing our website annually and when any major changes are made.
  • Making sure all relevant descriptive data (metadata, labels, alt-text and descriptions) are compliant with accessibility guidelines by checking all new content.

Preparation of this accessibility statement

This statement was prepared on 17 June 2020. It was last reviewed on 1 June 2021.

This website was originally tested in June 2020. The test was carried out by the Cabinet Office.

This website was last tested in August 2023. The test was carried out by Harborough District Council. You can view a snapshot of the results at accessibilitytest.org

Our website was tested in the following way:

  • A variety of pages on our website were tested, including; home pages, document pages, directories, news items and electronic forms.
  • Pages were selected which contained text, links and media to ensure examples of all content available on the website was tested.
  • Page navigation using a keyboard and screen reader was tested across all pages selected.