Accessibility

Technical information about this website’s accessibility

Slough 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, listed below.

Non-accessible content

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

Non-compliance with the accessibility regulations

Many of our older PDFs and Word documents do not meet accessibility standards - for example, they may not be structured so they’re accessible to a screen reader. This fails WCAG 4.1.2: Name, role value. We will work through the documents, which between April 2022 and March 2023 had a unique page view of 500 or more, to make them accessible. We aim to have this done by the end of March 2024.

We will strive to meet accessibility standards on any new PDFs or other documents we publish. We provide internal guidance to staff across the council that need documents posted on the site as well as seek appropriate external resources to assist us to comply.

There’s a 15-minute time limit set up within our online forms if there is 15-minutes of inactivity. The user cannot turn off, adjust or extend this expiry time. This fails WCAG 2.2.1: Timing adjustable. A warning has been added to all our forms to alert users of the time limit. It also advises they can register to MyAccount and start a form while logged in, where there is s longer time time of 24minutes and users can save their incomplete form and return to it at a later time or date.

If you find an issue that we have yet to identify, please contact us using one of the routes described in the Reporting accessibility problems with this website section of this statement.

Disproportionate burden

We are required by law to carry out disproportionate burden assessments where we are not able to meet our legal obligation to reach the WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standard. 

Conducting a full audit and buying auditing tools

We do not have the:

  • in-house expertise to carry out a full accessibility audit
  • funds to contract a third-party accessibility auditor to carry out a full audit
  • funds to invest in a web governance platform.

Further to our:

we consider this would be a disproportionate burden on the council. We have therefore, conducted a basic audit check as advised on the GOV site.

We have used free tools, as listed in our disproportionate burden assessment on buying auditing tools, to conduct our basic accessibility check.

PDFs and other documents on this site

Documents that already exist on this site are not all accessible. We will work through the documents, which between April 2022 and March 2023, had a unique page view of 500 or more, to make them accessible. However, further to our:

we consider making the rest of the PDFs and documents on the site accessible, with little evidence of demand, would be a disproportionate burden on the council.

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

PDFs and other documents

Many of our PDFs and Word documents are essential to providing our services. For example, we have forms in Word or PDF, which users need to complete to request or apply for something. A third party, such as residents, may provide documents that we have a duty to post up on our site. These documents may not be accessible, but we do not have the rights to amend or replace them.

Documents created for print distribution, which are now available on this site may not be accessible due to font sizing and layout. We are hoping to fix or replace documents into html, which are not accessible. We will work on documents which between April 2022 and March 2023 had a unique page view of 500 or more. We hope to do this and meet the WCAG 2.1 AA standards, by March 2024.

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.

CSV files can be found on this site. These raw data files are not accessible, we include them on the site for users to use for any analysis they may wish to do. We do include the same data in accessible Excel documents.

Video content

We do not plan to add captions to live video streams because live video is exempt from meeting the accessibility regulations. We also have some existing pre-recorded video content that was published before the 23 September 2020. This content is also exempt from the regulations.

For all our videos posted here after 23 September 2020, captions and transcripts are included.

Online maps

Our service includes the use of online maps to show certain geographical information. These are not used for navigational purposes and are exempt under the regulations. If you require the information presented on an online map in a different format, please contact us to discuss reasonable adjustments.

Links to other websites

We do signpost to websites that we do not own or manage. We do this because they give more information than we offer. We are not responsible for the accessibility of these sites.

Find a list of third-party sites funded, developed by or under our control.