Warrington Borough Council website

This accessibility statement applies to warrington.gov.uk

This website is run by Warrington 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:

  • zoom in up to 400% 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)

We’ve also made the website text as simple as possible to understand. AbilityNet has advice on making your device easier to use if you have a disability.

How accessible is this website

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

  • you cannot change colours, contrast levels or fonts
  • you cannot modify the line height or spacing of text
  • some older PDF documents are not fully accessible to screen reader software
  • live video streams do not have captions
  • some of our online forms may difficult to navigate using 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:

  • email digital@warrington.gov.uk or call 01925 443322, phone lines are open from 8:30am to 5pm Monday to Friday and charged at local rate.

We’ll consider your request and get back in touch with you. If you cannot view the map on our ‘contact us’ page, call us on 01925 443322 or email contact@warrington.gov.uk for directions.

Reporting accessibility problems with this website

We’re always looking to improve the accessibility of this website. If you find any problems not listed on this page or think we’re not meeting accessibility requirements, please email digital@warrington.gov.uk or call 01925 443322 and ask for a member of the communications team who will be able to help you.

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).

Contacting us by phone or visiting us in person

We provide a text relay service for people who are D/deaf, hearing impaired or have a speech impediment.

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

Details of how to contact us are on our contact us page.

Technical information about this website’s accessibility

Warrington 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.

Compliance status

This website is partially compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 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

Following an audit by central government several issues have been raised that we have now fixed and any remaining issues will be resolved with support of our third party web developers.

We know of the following issues:

  • Link without a text alternative
  • Form field is not labelled
  • Visible label and accessible name do not match
  • Container element is empty
  • Element IDs are not unique
  • Some image are without a text alternative
  • Some buttons are without a text alternative
  • Colour contrast is not sufficient

We plan to address the issues by the end of December 2021.

Disproportionate burden

Our most important content is provided on our main website, warrington.gov.uk, and we’re committed to doing monthly accessibility checks on this. Our planning and enforcement and building control websites have accessibility issues. We completed an assessment of the planning portal and concluded it could not be upgraded to improve the service it offers.

Therefore, to provide a better user experience, we are replacing these portals with more modern, up-to-date compliant sites by the following dates:

Planning and enforcement - November 2021

Building control - January 2022

These expected deadlines for completion are subject to change, but we will review the progress monthly and update the completion dates.

Why replacing these portals immediately would be a disproportionate burden

Our IT team is committed to creating accessible solutions with the support of our website delivery team. However, we believe that trying to fix inaccessible portals immediately would be a disproportionate burden because the current solution is end of life, does not meet the current needs of the users, cannot be reasonably updated as per the current contract and therefore is on a planned decommission and replacement process.

In reaching this decision, we have considered the following:

Assessment of the current system

The assessment concluded the current APAS planning system cannot be upgraded beyond what it is in place today and needed to be replaced. A suitable alternative was found which answered the needs of users and has been scheduled to go live.

Our organisation’s size and resources

As a local authority, we are managing increasing front-line service demands (e.g. for adult social care) with reducing annual budgets.

During 2020 we had to prioritise resources because of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic making sure essential services could continue to operate.

Our teams are now able to focus on more ‘business as usual’ activity and have a programme of work for our websites, which includes planning, building control and land charges.

Benefits from making the current site accessible

As the current solution is end of life, does not meet the current needs of the users and cannot be updated to bring into compliance, we cannot see any benefit in attempting to make the current solution accessible. The best solution would be to replace the Planning Portal with a more user friendly, compliant site, which we are currently in the process of delivering.

As an alternative you can get in touch with Contact Warrington who can help with finding out the information you need.

 

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

PDFs and other documents

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 or PDF documents. Some of these are being replaced with online forms as part of our Transformation programme and any other essential documents should be fixed or replaced with accessible HTML pages by the end of 2021.

Current PDF report

The accessibility regulations do not 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.

Live video

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

What we’re doing to improve accessibility

Our accessibility roadmap shows how and when we plan to improve accessibility on this website.

A full review of all WCAG 2.1 AA issues as identified by our Siteimprove testing software

This review found the issues in the CSV file.

Preparation of this accessibility statement

This statement was prepared on 21 September 2020. It was last reviewed on 20 September 2021. This website was last tested on 16 September 2021. The test was carried out by Warrington Borough Council web team using Siteimprove software and live user testing.

You can read the full accessibility test report.