Goring-on-Thames Parish Council is committed to providing a fully accessible website experience for all users of all abilities, including those who rely on assistive technologies like screen readers, screen enlargement software, and alternative keyboard input devices to navigate the web. Please note that while we make every effort to provide information accessible for all users the not every part of the website is as fully accessible as we aspire it to be.
Efforts to ensure accessibility
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) version 2.1 is our guiding principle for determining accessibility. These are internationally agreed-upon standards that cover a wide range of recommendations and best practices for making content useable. As we add new pages and functionality to our website, designs, code, and content entry practices are checked against tools to check adherence to these standards.
Website accessibility is an ongoing process. We regularly test content and features for WCAG 2.1 Level AA compliance and remediate any issues to ensure we meet or exceed the standards. Testing of our website is performed by our team members using industry-standard tools such as the Accessibility Checker WordPress Plugin, and the WAVE evaluation tool (an extension to the Chrome browser).
As well as going thorough page by page to make accessibility improvements we have changed our website to improve its accessibility through:
- Adoption of Neve WordPress theme (well reviewed for accessibility)
- Addition of wp-accessibilty plug-in
- Added icons (on right hand side) to toggle Font Size and toggle High Contrast
Known issues
In our efforts to bring our website up to standard, we are targeting the following areas:
- Headers, including search box and menus may not be perfectly accessible
- Labelling of email signup forms
- pdfs are not all fully accessible according to the Tingtun PAC PDF checker – we are producing a procedure to ensure that future pdfs are created fully accessibly
- historic pdfs can contain images/scans of text (eg minute or reports) rather than machine readable text. When we identify such a pdf we try to replace it with an accessibility compliant one, but due to the age of some of these items it is not always possible to recreate the pdf from source.
- we cannot guarantee the accessibility of third party websites to which we may link.
We welcome comments, questions, and feedback on our website. If you are using assistive technologies and are having difficulty using our website, please email j.emerson@goringparishcouncil.gov.uk and let him know the nature of the problem. We will do our best to assist you and resolve issues.