Accessibility statement for South Staffordshire Council

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

• Some of our online services are hosted by third-party suppliers and you may find navigating these services difficult depending on their level of web accessibility- you can contact us using the details below to ask for alternative formats

• Some of our online services require new windows or tabs to be opened which may clash with some mobile phones security settings. This will require you to update your settings.

• Some of our forms are currently in PDF or Word format  

• Most older PDF documents are not fully accessible to screen reader software 

• Many of our videos are embedded from YouTube and may feature labelling from YouTube itself, which may be incorrect or not sufficiently descriptive 

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

Email:  communications@sstaffs.gov.uk  

We’ll consider your request and get back to you in 10 working days. 

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: communications@sstaffs.gov.uk 

We link to other websites that may offer benefit to our users, as well as embedding content provided by some external websites into some of our pages. This may include: 

• social media platforms 
• official information sources, such as GOV.UK, NHS.UK. or ONS
• Council tax e-billing and benefits portals
• Planning portal 
• Councillor and council meetings portal

We are not responsible for the accessibility of these or any other websites we do not manage; if you experience any accessibility issue with third-party content then please do inform us to make us aware of the problem, but please also raise it with the third-party content provider for resolution as we will be unable to act ourselves. 

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’). Contact the Equality Advisory and Support Service (EASS) for further information. 

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. 

Find out how to contact us.  

South Staffordshire 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 mostly compliant with the  Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1 AA standard, however we are mindful of areas of  non-compliances which are listed below. 

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

• some of our older PDF's, Word, Excel, CSV, PowerPoint documents may not be accessible. 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. 

• some of our older videos may not have captions 

• some of our images may not have an 'alt-tag' 

We are aware that some internal applications and externally hosted systems do not comply with accessibility and usability standards. Some are old software that we cannot easily change. We’ve assessed the cost of fixing all the issues listed below and believe that doing so now would be a disproportionate burden within the meaning of the accessibility regulations: 

• geographical information mapping (GIS) 

• web tendering portal 

• pay links pages 

• secure online payment sites 

• application forms and online-forms  

• document library for our planning department (volume of scanned PDFs) 

Some parts of this site link to or use content provided by other websites and these are not always as accessible as our site. Examples of these are:  

• YouTube videos 

• tweets and the Twitter panels from Twitter 

• maps from Google 

• Facebook widgets 

• council meeting videos 

• committee minutes and agendas search and display system 

• Planning document system  

We are legally required to publish planning policy documents and most of these documents are PDFs and maps set to a certain required format and may not be fully accessible. 

Some of our interactive forms are difficult to navigate using a keyboard. For example, because some form controls are missing a ‘label’ tag. 

These forms are built and hosted through third party software and ‘skinned’ to look like our website. This fails WCAG 2.1 success criterion 1.3.1. 

We’ve assessed the cost of fixing the issues with navigation and accessing information, and with interactive tools and transactions. We believe that doing so now would be a disproportionate burden within the meaning of the accessibility regulations. We will make further assessments as and when relevant contracts are up for renewal.  

Our new website launched in March 2023 where we undertook a full content restructure. Doing this has highlighted some areas of further improvement where information and processes can be made fully accessible. 

We will be doing a full audit of PDFs that remain on the website and aim to replace or fix these, where we are able to do so, by January 2024. We also have governance in place so that no further documents are added to our website that don't meet accessibility standards.  

Wherever possible, we plan to provide an accessible HTML version of any new information as the primary source rather than using a PDF. As a minimum we will ensure PDFs published on our website can be fully accessed using the accessibility tools on our website. 

We will continue to work with all newly commissioned third party software providers to ensure their solutions and the online services they provide comply with the latest accessibility regulations.  

Periodically we will assess the accessibility of our website using an independent online assessment, Siteimprove, and carryout remedial actions. 

We are working to ensure that all videos have the correct captions and have governance in place to ensure no further videos are added without correct captions.  

We are working to remove unnecessary images, and where they are necessary, that they have appropriate alt tags and descriptions.  

This statement was prepared on 10th October 2023. This website was last tested on 10th October 2023. The test was carried out by Siteimprove (Opens in a new window).