Accessibility

What is accessibility?

Accessibility is the term used to describe how a product, service or place can be easily used by as many people as possible. It is about making things usable to all people, whatever their age, abilities or disabilities.

How does accessibility impact theis website?

We have taken all care to ensure our website complies with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (commonly known as WCAG 2.0).

Under these guidelines, all information on our website must be accessible and usable for people of all abilities, including older people and those with visual, hearing, cognitive or motor impairments.

What is WCAG 2.0

WCAG 2.0 is a series of international standards from the Word Wide Web Consortium. This organisation creates guidelines and supporting criteria for the web based on consultation with various interest groups including software developers, private enterprise, governments and members.

WCAG 2.0 identifies techniques to create and manage web content in ways that are more accessible to people with disabilities for example through assistive technologies like screen readers. Websites that are more accessible are also generally more user-friendly to everyone.

Usability testing

We are committed to making our site as user-friendly as possible. Extensive testing has been conducted on this site with key community groups and stakeholders. This feedback has been integrated into the design, navigation and content of our site. We will continue to develop, evaluate and improve the usability of our site to ensure our users' needs are being met.

Accessibility testing

Many people use assistive technologies such as screen readers or screen magnifiers to help them view, read and navigate a website. To ensure our site delivers a good experience for all users and works well with newer technologies, the site has been reviewed for accessibility against the WCAG 2.0 requirements.

We have built and modified the site to support the accessibility needs so that we become more inclusive to a wider audience online.

Accessibility Statement

Accessibility Statement for www.exmoor-nationalpark.gov.uk and www.exmoorher.co.uk

Last updated August 2023

What websites does this statement cover?

This statement refers to the Exmoor National Park website

www.exmoor-nationalpark.gov.uk

and all pages within it. It also includes the Historic Environment Record for Exmoor National Park

www.exmoorher.co.uk

Introduction

We want as many people as possible to be able to use these websites.  This includes people with sensory, physical and learning impairments. This should mean that should be able to

  • 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)
  • access key information that is easy to read as well accessible.

We want the content of our website to be clear and easy to understand. Where we have identified areas of the website that are not as accessible as they should be, we will work to improve them as quickly as we can.

How accessible are these websites?

We know that there are some areas of our website that are not fully accessible;

  • There are some key documents that are not available in an accessible html format.
  • Most older pdf documents are not fully accessible to screen reader software.
  • Some embedded videos have poor captioning where these are the result of automation.
  • We have some issues with  from elements  not being labelled  (tabs on  pages with tabbed layouts)

What to do if you cannot 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 then please get in touch.

Email us info@exmoor-nationalpark.gov.uk

Telephone us on 01398 323655.

We will consider your request and get back to you within 10 working days, and hopefully much sooner.

Reporting accessibility problems with this website.

We are always looking to improve the accessibility of this website. If you find any problems not listed on this page or think we’re not meeting accessibility requirements, contact:

Ben Totterdell

Email -  btotterdell@exmoor-nationalpark.gov.uk

Phone – 01398 322288

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

Exmoor National Park Authority 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.

Testing on Silktide platform  suggest that our main website is currently ( July 2021)   over 90% compliant with the AA standard ( up from 72% in April 2021)

Issue

WGAG2.1 AA success criteria

When we will fix the problem

Issues with PDFs

see below

Ongoing process of updating to accessible pdf formats

Issues with PDFs and other documents

Some of our older PDFs and Word documents do not meet accessibility standards - for example, they may not be marked up so they are accessible to a screen reader.

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.

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 information about our policies and plans . By September 2020, we plan to either fix these or replace them with accessible HTML pages.

We will work to ensure key new documents meet accessibility standards.

Disproportionate Burden

Insufficient contrast on embedded twitter timeline.

We embed content from our organisations twitter feed to help provide dynamic and up to date content. The contrast of this content is controlled not by us but by Twitter.  While we hope that this is something that Twitter will address at present our only option would be to removing all embedded feeds which would have a significant negative impact on the overall offer of our website.

Retrospective planning PDFs

We know we have many thousands of PDFs associated with our planning service that are not currently accessible. It is likely to be impossible for us to retrospectively go back and amend these,  we will however

  • Ensure that PDFs are accessible moving forwards.
  • Ensure that any non – accessible content on historic PDFs are provided in a suitable accessible format on request.

How we tested this website

We tested this website with a range of accessibility tools to check compliance with WGAG 2.1 AA. The main system we use to check compliance  is Silktide (www.silktide.com)

We also undertook a range of manual testing for readability and other aspects that ae difficult for automated testing to cover.

What we are doing to improve accessibility

  • We are currently working on a completely new website  that will meet All  AA standards. Launch due in spring 2023
  • We have a programme of accessibility improvement that has so far seen us progress from 72% compliance with the AA standard in April 2020 to over 90% in July 2020
  • We will work to improve the accessibility of documents published on the website.
  • We plan to continue with in depth user testing in the future, including with users of assistive technology.

Date of Statement

This statement was last updated 007/08/2023