Accessibility

Leicester City Council is committed to making its websites accessible, in accordance with the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018.

Accessibility Statement

Leicester City Council is committed to making its websites accessible, in accordance with the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018. This statement applies only to https://www.leicester.gov.uk/.

The council manages additional websites and digital applications which have their individual accessibility statements, such as:

My Account
Comments, Complaints and Compliments
Housing Online

https://www.leicester.gov.uk/ is run by Leicester 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 speech recognition software
Listen to most of the website using a screen reader (including the most recent versions of JAWS, NVDA and VoiceOver)

We’re also making 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 this website is

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

The venue maps are not fully accessible
The galleries are not fully accessible
Most older PDF documents aren’t fully accessible to screen reader software

Feedback and contact information

If you need information on this website in a different format:

Contact [email protected]
Call 0116 454 1000

We’ll consider your request and get back to you as soon as possible.

Reporting accessibility problems with this website

We are always looking to improve the accessibility of this website. If you find any problems, or think we are not meeting requirements, please contact the Web Management Team at [email protected].

You can also use the “Found a problem with this page?” contact form found at the bottom of every page if you are having a specific problem with a part of this website. Please note that we will be unable to respond to you unless you leave contact details.

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

Leicester 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 listed below.

Non-accessible content

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

Non-compliance with the accessibility regulations

Our gallery elements are only partially compliant because they:

Contain links without a text alternative. This doesn’t meet WCAG 2.1 Success Criterions 2.4.4 Link Purpose (In Context), 2.4.9 Link Purpose (Link Only), and 4.1.2 Name, Role, Value

The gallery links will be fixed by 31 October 2022.

Contain duplicate element IDs if multiple galleries are used on the same page. This doesn’t meet WCAG 2.1 Success Criterion 4.1.1 Parsing.

A fix to remove duplicate IDs will be implemented by 31 October 2022.

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

Maps are exempt from the accessibility regulations. We know however that there are issues with accessibility and some of these are listed below:

contain links only identified by colour. This doesn’t meet WCAG 2.1 Success Criterion 1.4.1 (Use of Colour).
Have elements which are not highlighted on focus. This doesn’t meet WCAG 2.1 Success Criterion 2.4.7 (Visible Focus).
Have insufficient colour contrast on some elements. This doesn’t meet WCAG 2.1 Success Criterion 1.4.3 (Contrast (Minimum)).

We are currently developing a new mapping system to replace the existing one that we hope will improve map accessibility for our users. The intention is that this will be in place on the website sometime during 2023.

PDFs and other documents

Many of our older PDFs and Word documents do not meet accessibility standards. For example, some are not structured so they are accessible to a screen reader.

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 documents. We have several on-going projects to fix or replace these documents.

The accessibility regulations do not require us to fix PDFs or other documents published before 23 September 2018 if they are not essential to providing our services.

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

What we’re doing to improve accessibility

We will be working to make improvements to this website soon.
The planned fixes are detailed below.

Galleries

The galleries functionality is being rebuilt to address the issues with links without text alternatives and duplicate IDs. Fixes are being developed and tested. These fixes are expected to be in place by September 2022.

Maps

The mapping functionality on our venue pages is being replaced. This is at an early stage of the project, and it is not expected that this will be in place before 2023.

PDFs

We are replacing older PDFs with HTML content where possible. This is an ongoing project with no fixed endpoint due to the volume of PDFs. However, we are committed to following the Government Digital Service example of creating a paperless digital experience.

Preparation of this accessibility statement

This statement was first prepared on 8 August 2019. It was reviewed and last updated on 27 May 2022.

We use an automated monitoring system called Site improve that crawls the website every 5 days for accessibility issues. We recognise that automated tools are limited in their ability to detect issues, so we also carry out frequent manual tests and act on user feedback when it is received. Some of the tools used include:

Google Chrome Lighthouse
TPGi ARC Toolkit for Google Chrome
Deque axe DevTools
Accessibility Insights for Web
NVDA
WAVE – Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool

PDFs and other documents

Many of our older PDFs and Word documents do not meet accessibility standards. For example, some are not structured so they are accessible to a screen reader.