Accessibility statement

Scope of this statement

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

This website is run by Swindon 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:

We also have a policy of writing and reviewing website content so that it is as simple as possible to understand.

AbilityNet has advice on making your device easier to use if you have a disability.

How accessible this website is

We know some aspects of this website aren’t fully accessible:

  • you can’t modify the line height of text
  • most older PDF documents aren’t fully accessible to screen reader software
  • we have some information pages that need to be changed to make the language we’ve used easier to understand
  • we don’t have a language translation tool on the website
  • we haven’t done extensive testing with screen reader technologies or speech recognition software
  • we have some pages where we link to different places using the same link text
  • some of our online forms are difficult to navigate using just a keyboard
  • some of our online forms may be hard to use using a screen reader
  • we need to make it easier to report a street issue without having to use a map to tell where the issue is

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:

We’ll consider your request and get back to you with an initial response within two working days.

Reporting accessibility problems with this website

We’re always looking to improve the accessibility of this website. If you find any problems that aren’t listed on this page or think we’re not meeting accessibility requirements, send details of your concern to accessibility@swindon.gov.uk. This concern will be initially addressed by our web content manager.

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

Find out how to contact us.

Technical information about this website’s accessibility

Swindon 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.

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

Non-compliance with the accessibility regulations

Not all PDFs are accessible

We have in excess of 2,000 PDFs available to download from the website. We have reduced this number from nearly 4,000 since September 2018.

For the remaining PDFs, we have made many fully accessible using tools in Adobe Acrobat Pro. The vast majority of PDFs or Word documents you need to access a service are fully accessible. However, there are still some PDFs or Word documents on the site that you need to access a service (for example, application forms) that are not fully accessible.  We plan to either fix these or replace them with accessible HTML pages by June 2023.

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

Maps used for reporting street issues

We invite users to drop a pin on a map to mark the location of some street issues. We recognise that this method isn’t suitable for people who are using screen readers. We plan to make an alternative means of supplying a location available and fully accessible. We aim to complete this by December 2022.

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

PDFs and other documents

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.

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

As well as the actions described in the above section, we are:

Acting upon insights from SiteImprove

We use SiteImprove to continually assess the quality of our website for accessibility compliance.

Scrutinising publication of PDFs

We do not publish without scrutiny any PDF published on the website.

Instead, we consider first whether the content proposed in the PDF could be published as an HTML webpage, making it inherently more accessible.

If that is not possible, we ensure that the PDF is fully accessible. We have published information on our Intranet about creating accessible PDFs and provided a template in order to do so..

Applying embedded standards when updating content

We have committed to a set of best practice principles when creating new content on the web. This ensures that content is conveyed in plain English, in a readable layout, and in adherence with our own style guide.

Whenever we update a web page we apply these scrutinise the content for adherence to these standards and, where necessary, make retrospective changes.

Committing six weeks a year to accessibility work

In addition to continual improvement that the web team can pick up when time allows, we plan to commit six weeks a year exclusively to accessibility throughout the year.

Every four months we will freeze normal updates to the website in order to focus fully on work that will improve the accessibility of Swindon.gov.uk and ongoing customer journeys at different domains.

We will update this accessibility statement during those focused periods.

Preparation of this accessibility statement

This statement was prepared on 22 September 2020. It was last reviewed on 20 January 2022.

Apart from automated tests through SiteImprove, we have not used a third party to audit the site for accessibility compliance. Instead, all our testing and scrutiny has been done internally.

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