Accessibility statement

Accessibility statement for www.barnet.gov.uk

This website is run by London Borough of Barnet. 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 500% without the text spilling off the screen
  • navigate most of the website using just a keyboard                          
  • 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’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.

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How accessible this website is

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

  • most older PDF documents aren’t fully accessible to screen reader software
  • live video streams don’t have captions
  • some of our online forms are difficult to navigate using just a keyboard

What to do if you can’t access parts of this website

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.

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, contact: webmaster@barnet.gov.uk.

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

Hearing loops are available in our reception areas and in the new Colindale reception areas as they open.

if you contact us before your visit we can arrange a British Sign Language (BSL) interpreter.

Find out how to contact us.

Technical information about this website’s accessibility

London Borough of Barnet 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 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

  1. The emergency announcement banners may not be able to be read by all assistive technologies. This does not meet WCAG 2.1 success criterion 3.3.1 (error identification).

We are working with our IT partner to correct this issue and plan to have this completed by October 2019. We will ensure that all such announcement will be able to be read by all technologies in the future.

  1. Some tables used to display data, information bought to our site from other websites may not display correctly across all devices and browsers. This does not meet WCAG 2.1 success criterion 1.3.1 (info and relationships)

We are working with our IT partner to correct this issue and plan to have this completed by October 2019. We will ensure that all parts of our site are displayed correctly across all devices and browsers in future.

  1. The related content element and the links element of our social care pages may not have logical navigation. This does not meet WCAG 2.1 success criterion 1.3.1 (info and relationships).

We are working with our IT partner to ensure that these elements are usable by assistive technologies, we plan to have this completed by October 2019. We will ensure that all elements of all pages have logical navigation in future.

Disproportionate burden

Online tools and transactions

Our online and transactions are built and hosted through third party software and ‘skinned’ to look like our website. Many of these do not meet WCAG 2.1 success criterion.

We are assessing the cost of fixing the issues with our third party providers. (see accessibility road map). We believe that doing so now would be a disproportionate burden within the meaning of the accessibility regulations. We will make other assessments when the supplier contracts are up for renewal.

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

PDFs and other documents

Many of our older PDFs and Word documents don’t meet accessibility standards - for example, they may not be structured so they’re accessible to a screen reader. This doesn’t meet WCAG 2.1 success criterion 4.1.2 (name, role value).

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. By September 2020, we plan to either fix these or replace them with accessible HTML pages.

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

Live video

Live video streams don’t have captions. This doesn’t meet WCAG 2.1 success criterion 1.2.4 (captions - live).

We don’t plan to add captions to live video streams because live video is exempt from meeting the accessibility regulations.

How we tested this website

This website was last tested on 20 September 2019. The test was carried out by London Borough of Barnet Digital Web team using the SiteImprove tool.

We tested:

You can read the full accessibility test report.

What we’re doing to improve accessibility

We are working on an accessibility roadmap which will show how and when we plan to improve accessibility on this website.

This statement was prepared on 1 September 2019. It was last updated on 20 September 2019.

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