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 Services EASS

Contacting us by phone or visiting us in person

Find out how to contact us.

Technical information about this website’s accessibility

Stevenage 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.

Non-accessible content

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

Non-compliance with the accessibility regulations

Some images do not have a text alternative, so people using a screen reader cannot access the information. This fails WCAG 2.1 success criterion 1.1.1 (non-text content).

We plan to add text alternatives for all images by October 2020. When we publish new content we’ll make sure our use of images meets accessibility standards.

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

PDF and other documents

Many of our PDFs don’t meet accessibility standards – for example they may not be structured to make them accessible to a screen reader – this does not meet WCAG 2.1 success criterion 4.1.2. Any PDFs that are essential to providing services, for example forms or information leaflets, will be replaced with online forms or html pages. We plan to fix these issues by March 2021.

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. For example, we do not plan to fix our Local Plan examination documents as these are reference documents that date back to 2017.

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

Live video

We do not plan to add captions to live video streams because live video is exempt from meeting the accessibility regulations.

Third party content and documents.

We are not responsible for third party content and cannot guarantee that is it accessible.

We often link to third party websites or content when there is useful information that relates to our services. For example, the Gov.uk website.

We create content on third party platforms. For example, You Tube. We’re responsible for making sure the content is accessible but we're not responsible for YouTube's platform.

Third-party applications

We require that any new third party systems we commission for the website are Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 AA compliant. However, third party applications are partly or wholly out of our control and so may not conform to the same levels of accessibility as the rest of the website. Third-party applications include:

Civica online payments
Capita Council Tax and Benefit forms
Granicus AchieveForms
Idox planning applications search and licensing register
Moderngov Councillor information, meetings, agendas and minutes
Local Community Budgets
Online petitions

We are working with our suppliers to ensure that these systems meet accessibility guidelines where appropriate.

Preparation of this accessibility statement

This statement was prepared on 22 September 2020.

This website was last tested 13 August 2020. The test was carried out by the Digital Accessibility Centre (DAC). The accessibility issues with the code highlighted by the DAC have been addressed and we are awaiting a retest.

For the purposes of accessibility testing a sample of each template was selected that included at least one element of each of the following:

Video (iframe)
PDF
Online form
Embedded form
Related pages
Related documents
External link
Internal link
Map
Image
Table
Contact details

Local Housing Allowance