Skip to main content

Accessibility

This website is run by BCP 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 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.

How accessible this website is

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

  • most older PDF documents are not fully accessible to screen reader software
  • live video streams do not have captions
  • some links may not have distinguishable names
  • there are some formatting issues with tables

Technical information about this website’s accessibility

BCP 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 and exceptions listed below.

Non-accessible content

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

  • Images - some images do not have a text alternative, so people using a screen reader cannot access the information. This fails WCAG 2.1 criteria 1.1.1 (non-text content). When we publish new content we’ll make sure our use of images meets the requirements under accessibility guidelines, following best practice laid out in W3C alt decision tree. Existing non compliant images are being reviewed to be updated by the end of this year.
  • Tables: the iFrame has no 'title' attribute or the 'title' attribute is empty. This fails WCAG 2.1 guideline 4.1.2 Name, Role, Value. Additionally HTML formatting such as 'border', 'align', or 'bgcolor' is used in some tables, rather that CSS formatting. This fails WCAG 2.1 criteria 1.3.1 Info and Relationships. We are working on table styling issues.
  • The purpose of some links is not clear enough to screen readers and some link text is used for multiple different destinations on some pages. This fails WCAG 2.1 guideline 2.4.4 Link Purpose (in context). These errors should be corrected by April 2024.

Content that is not within the scope of the accessibility regulations

PDFs and other documents

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.

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

We are working on a disproportionate burden clause for categories of PDF that are not part of an essential service, given the time and cost of making all PDFs accessible and their relatively low levels of usage. Meanwhile, we are prioritising the improvement the accessibility of documents that contain information about how to access or use our statutory services. We plan to either fix these or replace them with accessible HTML pages.

Video

Some of our older videos do not meet accessibility standards because they do not have captions. The accessibility regulations do not require us to fix videos published before 23 September 2020. New videos will include captions.