Website Accessibility Statement

Accessibility Statement for www.worcester.gov.uk

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

This website is run by Worcester City 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 300% without the text spilling off the screen
• navigate most of the website using just a keyboard
• listen to most of the website using a screen reader (including the most recent versions of JAWS, NVDA and VoiceOver)
• listen to most of the website in a logical manner using a screen reader.
• skip navigation to main content when using a screen reader
• 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:

• Most older PDF, CSV and Word documents are not fully accessible to screen reading software
• Some of our forms are documents that are not fully accessible to screen reading software.
• Some of our online forms contain errors, such as unlabelled fields, missing notification of mandatory form fields and a form error message which make them difficult to use with screen reading software
• Some of our news/blog pages, do not have the correct heading structure which can make them difficult to navigate using a screen reader.
• There is a contrast issue on some of our forms which can make text harder to read
• Some tables are incorrectly marked up which can make them difficult to understand when using screen reader software
• Some pages contain empty links, this can make it difficult to navigate the site using a keyboard
• Several pages have non-descriptive links which may make it difficult to work out whether to active the link or not
• A small number of images are missing alternate text
• Some of our video content may not have captions or transcripts

• You cannot modify the line-height or spacing of the text without the aid of third-party tools
• websites and documents that are produced by third-party organisations and are linked from Worcester City Council
• keyboard navigation using interactive features (such as My Local Area address list selection, Planning Search map layer selection, Self Service box-ticking)

Feedback and contact information

If you need information on this website in a different format like accessible PDF, large print, easy read or audio recording:

• This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
• 01905 722233 and speak to the customer service team.

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 not listed on this page or think we’re not meeting accessibility requirements, contact, Worcester City Council at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or call 01905 722233.

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).

Technical information about this website’s accessibility

Worcester City 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-compliance with the accessibility regulations

Unlabelled form fields

Some of our pages contain unlabelled form fields. This fails success criterion 1.1.1 Non-text Content (Level A), 1.3.1 Info and Relationships (Level A), 1.3.5 Identify Input Purpose (Level AA), 2.5.3 Label in Name (Level A), 3.3.2 Labels or Instructions (Level A) and 4.1.2 Name, Role, Value (Level A).

Our web development team is currently investigating a fix for this issue. It will be implemented as soon as possible but before 31 October 2022.

Empty button

Some pages contain an empty button used for searching for content. This fails success criterion 1.1.1 Non-text Content (Level A), 1.3.1 Info and Relationships (Level A), 1.3.5 Identify Input Purpose (Level AA), 3.3.2 Labels or Instructions (Level A) and 4.1.2 Name, Role, Value (Level A).

Our web development team is currently investigating a fix for this issue. It will be implemented as soon as possible but before 31 October 2022.

Missing notification of mandatory form fields

Some forms do not inform the user a form field is mandatory in a way screen readers can identify. This fails success criterion 1.1.1 Non-text Content (Level A), 1.3.5 Identify Input Purpose (Level AA), 3.3.2 Labels or Instructions (Level A) and 4.1.2 Name, Role, Value (Level A).

Our web development team is currently investigating a fix for this issue. It will be implemented as soon as possible but before 31 October 2022.

Form error handling

Some of our forms do not easily inform the user when an error has been made submitting the form. This fails success criterion 3.3.1 Error Identification (Level A), 3.3.3 Error Suggestion (Level AA), 3.3.4 Error Prevention (Legal, Financial, Data) (Level AA), 4.1.3 Status Messages (Level AA).

Our web development team is currently investigating a fix for this issue. It will be implemented as soon as possible but before 31 October 2022.

Non-descriptive link text

Some pages contain links which do not describe the links destination and purpose. This fails success criterion 1.3.1 Info and Relationships (Level A) and 2.4.4 Link Purpose (In Context) (Level A).

We plan to go through the site page by page and fix these issues as soon as possible but by 31 October 2022 at the latest.

Ambiguous button labeling

Some of our forms do not have prescriptive labels so users know what information to enter on a form. This fails success criterion 1.1.1 Non-text Content (Level A), 1.3.1 Info and Relationships (Level A), 1.3.5 Identify Input Purpose (Level AA), 3.3.2 Labels or Instructions (Level A) and 4.1.2 Name, Role, Value (Level A).

Our web development team is currently investigating a fix for this issue. It will be implemented as soon as possible but before 31 October 2022.

Mouse dependent areas

Some sections of our online payment forms are dependent on the use of a mouse. This fails success criterion 2.1.1 Keyboard (Level A) and 1.4.13 Content on Hover or Focus (Level AA).

Our web development team is currently investigating a fix for this issue. It will be implemented as soon as possible but before 31 October 2022.

Inaccessible Non-HTML Documents

There are more than 1,800 documents, including those in PDF, Word and CSV formats that are not fully accessible. This fails success criterion 1.1.1 Non-text Content (Level A), 1.3.1 Info and Relationships (Level A), 1.3.2 Meaningful Sequence (Level A), 2.4.2 Page Titled (Level A), 3.1.1 Language of Page (Level A).

We are implementing a document strategy to go through and replace all documents with accessible versions, apart from those that are considered disproportionate burdens or exempt under the regulations. We will complete this work as soon as possible but no later than 31 March 2023.

Some documents submitted to the website between 23 September 2018 and 28 February 2022 may not be fully accessible or have accessible alternatives.

All new documents submitted to the website from 1 March 2022 should be fully accessible.

Disproportionate burden

We do not currently believe there are any technical aspects of the website that could be considered a disproportionate burden under the web accessibility regulations.

The website contains more than 1,800 documents, in various formats that are not accessible. While we intend to go through these documents and either remove or replace these with an HTML page or other accessible alternative, there are some documents we believe would be disproportionate to make accessible.

This is based on the impact they would have on the organisation, cost to the taxpayer and value for money for the taxpayer, and the limited benefit they would have to people with accessibility issues.

These documents, and the individual disproportionate burden assessments made for each one, are listed below.

Annual Statement of Accounts

The Annual Statement of Accounts is a complex document. The content and layout of the Statement of Accounts is prescribed by the Code of Practice issued by CIPFA (Chartered Institute of Public Finance) which is in turn based on the requirements set out in International Accounting Standards.

It is a largely technical document and contains complex tables throughout that do not meet accessibility guidelines. It also contains technical phrasing and concepts.

To meet accessibility guidelines an additional alternative format document would be required.  Some of the information required by the Code of Practice would have to be omitted because it is not possible to present it in an accessible way.

We estimate that it would take an extra 10 days of officer time to develop and update the additional document. This document would have to be audited by the external auditors and approved by committee.

We estimate the cost to the Council would be £4,000 to prepare the document each year and up to £5,000 to audit the document each year.

CIPFA have yet to publish anything on accessibility. The Code of Practice is updated annually. The latest consultation on the code of practice published on 4 February 2022 focuses on delays in 20/21 audits and has no mention of accessibility.

CIPFA can update the Code to provide content and layout to meet accessibility guidelines.

However, this is likely to be an additional document because of the complexities of the accounting standards that govern the information contained in the Statement of Accounts document. Current CIPFA communications do not make any reference to this for 2022/23.

The Statement of Accounts is not widely reviewed on the website, with information relevant to residents (such as how the council spends council tax funding) available from other areas of the website in an accessible format.

The finance team work to a strict and short deadline to produce the statement of accounts in the prescribed format.

There is significant pressure on both the finance team to prepare the document and supporting working papers and also the external auditors to complete the audit within the national deadlines. The external audit market is suffering significant shortage of resources and additional burdens in terms of the level of examination they have to undertake.  An additional document would have to be audited with the same level of examination of the statement of accounts.

This would need an increase in audit resources at a direct cost to the council but also imposes significant pressure on the finance team to prepare the additional document and the supporting working papers.

We believe based on the assessment above that making the statement of accounts fully accessible would be a disproportionate burden on the council given the impact it would have on delivering a critical, and legally required, council function with minimal benefit to people with accessibility issues.

We will review this disproportionate burden assessment before 10 February 2023.

Weekly lists of planning applications

The planning weekly lists are downloaded from third-party software operated by DEF which provides most of the planning software for planning authorities across the UK. As this is a third-party operator not directly developed, commissioned, controlled or funded by us it could be said to be outside the scope of the regulations, but we have included a disproportionate burden assessment as we control the data that goes into the system.

When the lists are downloaded each week they are generated in a set template as a Word document or PDF. We don’t have the ability to control what this template looks like. The template unfortunately uses tables for layout reasons that are not accessible as they cannot be fully understood by a screen reader.

To make them accessible would require restructuring and formatting the entire document from scratch each week, and repeating that process 5 other times for the various lists. The number of items on each list varies from week to week but on an average week, about 15 and 20 items per list can be expected.

We estimate it would take 4.5 hours of officer time a week to convert each of these lists or 234 hours. This compares to the current 10 minutes for all lists each week.

We have contacted Def, the software provider who tells us they are aware of the accessibility issues and it is affecting all councils across the UK. They are committed to tackling these issues but are finding meeting the regulations challenging.

Def have issued a statement on accessibility on their website.

Read the Def accessibility statement.

Def has indicated they are working on a fix and would be willing to work with us in the future to design an accessible template that would reduce the burden and allow us to meet the regulations. We don’t have a timeline yet for a fix.

The planning lists pages receives about 800 page views a week but most of that comes from our email alert list, which drives people to the page.

We have checked the lists with screen reading software and they are partially compliant in that a user would be able to get the basic information they need but it is made more difficult by their lack of full accessible functionality.

The lists themselves just provide basic information on what has been validated in any given week. There are alternatives available to view or search for applications using our planning search feature which are accessible.

Any application that directly affects someone within the legally set distance will trigger a neighbor notification letter and there are already processes in place to make reasonable adjustments to make sure people find out the information they need to know.

Taking 4.5 hours of officer time each week, for very little benefit to people with accessibility issues, cannot be justified at this time and would affect the wider performance of the service. We believe the public, including people with accessibility issues, are better served by officers spending their time dealing with planning applications that come in.

We believe based on the assessment above that making the weekly planning lists fully accessible would be a disproportionate burden on the council given the impact it would have on delivering a critical, and legally required, council function with minimal benefit to disabled users.

This disproportionate burden assessment was prepared on 4 February 2022 and will be reviewed before 4 February 2023.

Licensing forms

We are responsible for licensing a range of functions. These require the submission of various forms. The format and content of these forms are prescribed by law. The majority of them are not currently in an accessible format.

Many of the forms would also be of little benefit to people with a disability that resulted in an accessible issue, for example applying for a taxi driver licence.

We investigated the potential for our web team to develop an accessible version of these forms. It was estimated it would take 12 months of development time. The development team consists of just two people. Taking this amount of time to develop accessible forms that would be of little benefit to the end-user would cause significant issues with other areas of the ICT team’s work, including in the critical area of improving cyber security.

If anyone found they needed to apply for a particular licence and was unable to fill the form in on the website, our customer service team is available to help fill the form in for the customer over the phone or in-person if they visit our reception.

They can do this by calling our customer service team on 01905 722233 or visit us our Customer Service Centre at Guildhall, High Street, Worcester, WR1 2EY.

For these reasons, we believe making these forms would be a disproportionate burden on the organisation.

As part of our accessible document project, we will review this position and consider if some of the easier-to-convert forms could be developed over time.

This disproportionate burden assessment will be reviewed by 31 March 2023.

Agendas, minutes and reports

Modern.gov is the third-party software we use to manage our Council agendas, minutes, reports and other committee papers.

There are approximately more than 900 documents on our modern.gov system which were published after 23 September 2018 and are not fully accessible. The documents do read in a logical order but do not have the full functionality someone using screen reading software would require.

There are also minutes of decisions taken, and the agenda itself, published in HTML on the system which would be accessible.

The Member Support team consists of just two people and it is a busy section with 35 members to support.

It is estimated converting one document could take up to 20 minutes, depending on the number of documents and accessibility issues to be resolved.

If an average agenda contains eight items then it could take more than two hours to convert and republish one agenda. Having to do this to cover all meetings between 23 September 2018 and the end of May 2022 would require officer time in excess of 136 hours.

Given there is very limited benefit to retrospectively converting these documents and the amount of time required to carry out the task, we consider this to be a disproportionate burden under the regulations.

If anyone requires access to information from this period then they can contact Member Support Services email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. who will be happy to make the information accessible on request.

A new accessible template has now been issued to officers and all committee reports and agendas should be fully accessible from 1 March 2022.

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

PDFs and other documents

Our older PDFs, Word and Excel, and third-party documents do not meet accessibility standards. This does not meet WCAG 2.1 success criterion 4.1.2 (name, role value). However, 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, unless found otherwise. Any new PDFs or Word documents we publish will meet accessibility standards.

Video captions

Prerecorded videos published before 23 September 2020 do not include captions. This doesn’t meet WCAG 2.1 success criteria 1.2.2 Captions (Prerecorded). Captions may not be added to these videos because a prerecorded video published before 23 September 2020 is exempt from meeting the accessibility regulations. Any prerecorded video content we publish after 23 September 2020 will meet accessibility standards.

Maps

Interactive maps are exempt from meeting the accessibility regulations.

Third-party content

We are unable to make third-party content that is not under our control fully accessible. This content is exempt from the web accessibility regulations.

This includes:

• Social media buttons
• Adelante payment system is used for some of our pay it pages. We are in contact with Adelante to see if they intend to provide a fix for the issues found. If not we will consider this when we next review the contract in five years' time. Alternative payment options are available including a 24-hour free-to-use telephone payment system.
• Xpress electoral management software. This is used for the running of our elections. We have asked Civica, who have developed the system if they can develop a fix and so far they have been unable to find one, This is partly because the way the forms have to be laid out is prescribed by elections legislation. This is a national issue as all councils use Xpress software.
• modern.gov which is the system used for managing our agendas and hosting information about our councillors. We are in contact with modern.gov to ask them if they can investigate a fix for issues raised, particularly obscure text which fails success criterion 1.4.4 Resize text (Level AA). We will update this statement once we have an outcome from the investigation.
• PDFs or other non-accessible files provided to us by other organisations we are legally required to publish, for example, planning documentation. We will make this information available in an accessible format on request.
• The Planning Portal. This is a national website that provides information on planning issues and is used to make some planning applications. The accessibility of these forms are outside and this content is outside of our control.

How we test this website

A desktop audit and automated test software is carried out weekly by Worcester City Council.

We test our main website platform worcester.gov.uk

What we’re doing to improve accessibility

Any new content we publish to the website will:

• Be structured well
• Use plain English
• Contain accessible PDFs

Website testing is carried out weekly to identify accessibility issues, in which they will be tackled in order of those with the greatest impact.

Accessibility User Testing will be carried out in the future to test the accessibility and usability of the functions on the website.

My Computer My Way (MCMW) offer guides to using assistive technologies to use websites with a range of devices.

Our ambition is the majority of issues identified here will be fixed by 31 October 2022.

Enforcement procedure

If you have a complaint about the accessibility of our website, you should raise a complaint using our internal Complaints, Compliments and Suggestions procedure.

If you are not satisfied with our response then 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’) and you should contact the Equality Advisory and Support Service (EASS).

Contacting us by phone or visiting us in person

If you wish to contact us about anything not covered in this statement, please visit our Contact us page.

You can also visit us in person at The Guildhall, High Street, Worcester, WR1 2EY or telephone our Customer Service Centre on 01905 722233.

Preparation of this accessibility statement

This statement was prepared on 26 May 2022. It was last reviewed on 27 May 2022.

This statement will be reviewed in full again by 31 October 2022.

This website was last tested on 2 May using in-house testing tools. Testing of every page on the site was carried out using a combination of the following automated software checking tools: Silktide, WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool: (webaim.org), and Axe.

The scope of the automated testing involved establishing a representative sample of pages by employing various methods including using a list of pages common to many websites, inspecting the site for variations in layout and functionality, and selecting pages at random.