We want everyone who visits the www.StoketristerBayford.net website to feel welcome and find the content informative and useful.

What are we doing?

To help us make the Stoke Trister and Bayford website a positive place for everyone, we’ve been using the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1. These guidelines explain how to make web content more accessible for people with disabilities, and user friendly for everyone.

The guidelines have three levels of accessibility (A, AA and AAA). We’ve chosen the highest Level A as the target for the Stoke Trister and Bayford website.

How are we doing?

We’re working hard to achieve our goal of Level A accessibility, but we realise there are some areas that still need improving. The following information explains what we’re doing to make that happen.

We are aware that we have 13 issues that would need resolving to meet Level A, this is predominantly to do with attachments (mainly Word and PDF documents) that we have posted on behalf of third parties. In some instances, this is difficult to address but we will try to mitigate where possible. We will make a decision on how we handle historic attachments as to whether we keep these in place for record/archive purposes or remove them from the website.

Level A

We only have 11 issues across 213 pages which are all predominately posts and their associated attachments. The list below have identified pages/posts/attachments where these actions need to take place to meet the Level A standard. We will be working through these and hope to see an improvement when we check again in December, in some cases pages/attachments will be removed completely.

1. Change the alt text to a description of the image (6 instances) – May just remove these posts as they are old village newsletters.
2. Document title must not be blank. For HTML pages change the title element. For Office documents and PDF documents produced from Office, fill in the Title in Document Properties before saving as PDF. (22 instances)
3. Duplicate id – the same ID is used on more than one element. (1 instance) – This is a page that just needs updating.
4. Each a element must contain text or an img with an alt attribute. (147 instances) – This will take a bit of work but is a simple fix, just time consuming.
5. Figures and images in PDF documents should have non blank ALT text, except for decorative images which should be marked as artifacts. Each image should have an ALT attribute describing the picture, which screen readers can read aloud. (36 instances) – All reference PDF attachments.
6. Identify row and column headers in data tables using th elements, and mark layout tables with role=presentation. (1 instance) – Will just remove this post
7. Link uses general text like ‘Click Here’ with no surrounding text explaining link purpose. Screen reader users use text around links to help understand what the link does. If the link text is very general, and there’s no surrounding text, there’s no way to work out what the link does. (2 instances) – posts are out-of-date so will be removed
8. PDFs must be tagged to be accessible by screen readers. Enable the ‘Document structure tags’ option in Word, or the ‘Tagged PDF’ option in OpenOffice when exporting, or use the ‘Make Accessible’ plug-in for Adobe Acrobat. (36 instances) – May just remove these posts as they are old village newsletters.
9. Several links on a page share the same link text and surrounding context, but go to different destinations. (9 instances) – This will be the way posts are categorised so will look at how this can be changed.
10. Removing the underline from links makes it hard for color-blind users to see them. (3 instances) – Believe these are the links in the footer, we can look to add a line beneath to resolve this.
11. Use the lang attribute to identify the language of the page (41 instances) – This is a PDF attachment issue, quick fix is to remove the posts altogether. Again, these are mostly Village News.
12. Word document contains a graphic without Alt Text. (1 Instance) – This can be removed as it is now out-of-date.
13. Word document contains a non-inline graphic or object (2 instances) – Both of these are posts that can be removed.

Level AA

We currently have 2 issues on 3 pages.

1.4.3: Contrast (Minimum)

The visual presentation of text and images of text has a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1, except for the following: (Level AA)

Large Text: Large-scale text and images of large-scale text have a contrast ratio of at least 3:1;

Incidental: Text or images of text that are part of an inactive user interface component, that are pure decoration, that are not visible to anyone, or that are part of a picture that contains significant other visual content, have no contrast requirement.

Logotypes: Text that is part of a logo or brand name has no minimum contrast requirement.

• On our website this is ‘Incidental’ and part of an inactive user interface component.

F78:       Change the style to avoid obscuring the focus outline around focusable elements.

The CSS outline or border style on this element makes it difficult or impossible to see the dotted link focus outline.

• Have identified the area to change but will get some advice as to what is acceptable.

Let us know what you think

Stoker Trister and Bayford Parish Council is committed to ensuring that all aspects of its website are accessible, if you had trouble with any part of it, please get in touch. We’d like to hear from you by emailing stoketristerpc@gmail.com

We test the website on a quarterly basis against the WCAG 2.1 guidelines.

This accessibility statement was generated on 20th October 2020.

We use Powermapper SiteSort to check the website for accessibility and compatibility issues. The next scheduled check will be on 20^th December 2020.