Accessibility statement for Croydon Council

This website is run by Croydon Council and we want as many people as possible to be able to use this website.

This accessibility statement applies to www.croydon.gov.uk which is run by Croydon 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
  • embedded videos do not all have captions
  • some of our online forms are difficult to navigate using just a keyboard
  • some embedded content from third party sites is not compliant with code standards, which may make it difficult to use. Alternative content formats are given wherever possible.

Feedback and contact information

If you need information on this website in a different format like accessible PDF, large print, easy read, audio recording or braille:

We’ll consider your request and get back to you in five working days.

Reporting accessibility problems with this website

We’re 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 Croydon Digital Service.

Email ecomms@croydon.gov.uk.

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

Croydon 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 exemptions.

Non-accessible content

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

Non-compliance with the accessibility regulations

Known issues are listed in the test results reports. This website is in active development and non-compliant issues detected in our testing will be resolved in order of impact and difficulty. The site is updated 2 to 4 times a month with new code releases. 

Disproportionate burden

Some of our embedded forms are difficult to navigate using a keyboard, and are provided by an application used to create over 200 forms. For example, some form controls are missing a ‘label’ tag or the label is not correctly associated with the field, failing WCAG 2.1 success criterion 1.3.1 (information and relationships). This issue has been raised with the application provider, and an alternative application is being implemented.

We’ve assessed the cost of fixing interactive tools and transactions. We believe that doing so now would be a disproportionate burden within the meaning of the accessibility regulations. We are currently piloting new applications to replace many of our forms and transactions.

Content that’s not within the scope of 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 does not meet WCAG 2.1 success criterion 4.1.2 (name, role value).

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 forms published as Word documents.

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.

We endeavour for any new PDFs we publish to meet accessibility standards, and we are also developing ways to publish files in accessible HTML formats.

What we’re doing to improve accessibility

This website is built using open source technology provided by the LocalGov Drupal project. It is continuously being reviewed and improved to resolve outstanding accessibility issues, and provide a greater resource to identify and resolve any new issues that occur.

Statement history

This statement was prepared on 28 February 2020. It was last updated on 13 May 2021.

This website was last tested on 13 May 2021. The test was carried out by Siteimprove's automated services.

Testing

We tested 2,614 pages covering all areas of the site, only excluding programmatically generated URLs containing duplicated content (such as URLs of filtered directory content).

Test results

Download reports of the test results.

Download the summary report (PDF file, 0.16MB)

Download the detailed report (CSV file, 0.04MB)

External assessment

This site has been assessed by the Shaw Trust Accessibility Services and you can see our status on their website

The Shaw Trust Digital Assessment and Accreditation process is rigorous. Over 60 hours of accessibility testing by users with a disability goes into each and every accreditation. This is in addition to a stringent technical assessment by our digital auditors.All assessments are carried out inline with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 A and AA  criteria.