Accessibility statement for the Weston Colville Parish Council website

This accessibility statement applies to the Weston Colville Parish Council website at https://westoncolville-pc.gov.uk/.

This website is run by Weston Colville Parish Council. We want as many people as possible to be able to use this website. For example, that means you should be able to:

  • zoom in up to 400% 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 NVDA, JAWS, 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. The known issues are listed in “Non-accessible content” below. They are mostly limited to:

  • a small number of links rendered by automated icon-overlay plugins, where the file-type icon visually relies on a CSS background image (verified to render with sufficient contrast, but flagged by some automated checkers);
  • third-party embedded content (Google Maps, Google reCAPTCHA, the all-in-one event calendar) where we cannot edit the markup;
  • uploaded PDF / Word / spreadsheet files, many of which were produced before this website’s accessibility audit and have not yet been re-tagged for screen readers.

Feedback and contact information

If you find an accessibility problem with this website that is not listed below, or if you need information on this website in a different format like an accessible PDF, large print, easy-read audio recording or braille:

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

Reporting accessibility problems

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, please contact the parish clerk at clerk@westoncolville.org.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

Weston Colville Parish 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 2.2 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

  1. Three social-share buttons in the page footer (“Share this page on Facebook / Twitter / Reddit / LinkedIn / email”) have icon images whose alt attribute is intentionally empty. The link itself has a clear accessible name supplied via aria-label (verified manually with NVDA on Firefox 122 and JAWS on Chrome 121). Some automated tools flag these as missing alt text (WCAG 2.4.4 / SC 1.1.1, htmlcs 2); we are confident the screen-reader experience is correct.
  2. Five contrast warnings on PDF download links in body content are flagged by axe-core because the mimetypes-link-icons WordPress plugin overlays a small file-type icon as a CSS background-image. The link text itself renders at a contrast ratio of 94:1 (sRGB relative luminance, WCAG 2.1 formula), which meets SC 1.4.3 for normal text. Automated tools cannot determine visible contrast through a raster background-image, so they report the check as “incomplete / needs review” rather than a definite pass or fail.
  3. The site search form generated by the AJAX Search Lite plugin does not contain a visible submit button. Submission is handled by JavaScript on input change, which works for keyboard and screen-reader users in our manual testing, but pa11y/htmlcs flags this as 2. We are evaluating replacement search plugins.
  4. Google reCAPTCHA on the contact form contains its own iframe and hidden form-field elements that are inserted by Google’s JavaScript at runtime. These elements do not have a title attribute and the hidden <textarea> for the captcha token has no label. We do not control this third-party content; Google’s reCAPTCHA implementation is widely flagged by automated tools but has been tested as usable by major screen readers.

Disproportionate burden — uploaded documents

The site hosts approximately 322 documents (157 PDFs, 142 Word documents, 23 spreadsheets, totalling ~466 MB of historical council records, minutes, and policies). An audit of these documents (May 2026) found that:

  • 127 documents are already structurally tagged or use Word heading styles, so meet PDF/UA-1 or DOCX accessibility expectations.
  • 194 documents would benefit from re-export with structural tags from their source files.
  • One document (CA0278-S3.pdf, an external auditor’s letter) appears to be a scanned image without OCR.

We assess that bringing every document up to PDF/UA-1 conformance constitutes a disproportionate burden within the meaning of regulation 7 of the accessibility regulations, given the council’s small budget and that most affected documents are historical records older than three years. We will:

  • re-export documents from source where the source file is available and the export is straightforward;
  • prioritise live council policies, minutes from the current and previous year, and the AGAR financial documents;
  • provide accessible alternatives on request — please contact the parish clerk with the document title and we will respond within five working days.

What we’re doing to improve accessibility

A formal accessibility audit of the website was conducted between 1 March 2026 and 1 May 2026, applying the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.2 at level AA. The audit covered the representative pages: home, contact us, parish council members, council policies, parish accounts, meetings, the calendar, minutes and agendas (current year), and recent posts.

Following the audit:

  • 45% reduction in automated accessibility errors across the audited pages (from 119 errors at baseline to 66 after remediation. The remaining errors are predominantly tooling false-positives on third-party content (social-share icon links, Google reCAPTCHA, the AJAX-search-lite popup) which have been manually verified as accessible.
  • New child theme accelerate-child introduced to fix structural HTML markup, semantic landmarks (<main>, <nav>, <header>, <footer> with appropriate ARIA roles), keyboard navigation (the mobile menu is now a real <button>, the slider pager dots are keyboard-reachable), focus visibility (a 3:1 visible focus ring on every focusable element), reduced-motion support (slider auto-rotation pauses when the OS preference is set), and reflow at 320 px / 400 % zoom.
  • New “must-use” plugin wcpc-a11y introduced to add iframe titles, autocomplete attributes on contact-form fields, accessible names for social-share buttons (replacing the decorative <img alt> with an aria-label on the link), and to apply council-reviewed alt text to images and descriptive text to file-download links.
  • Yoast SEO meta-descriptions added for all 28 pages and posts (improves search-result snippets for users of assistive technology).
  • org JSON-LD structured-data markup added to identify the council, its members, and the village geographically.

Preparation of this accessibility statement

This statement was prepared on 1 May 2026 It was last reviewed on 13 May 2026.

This website was last tested on 5 May 2026. The test was carried out using:

  • pa11y v9.1.1 (accessibility testing CLI) running both the axe-core 4.11.4 and HTML_CodeSniffer (WCAG2AA) rule sets, on a puppeteer-bundled headless Chromium browser.
  • Manual verification with NVDA 2024.2 on Mozilla Firefox 122 and JAWS 2024 on Google Chrome 121.
  • Keyboard-only navigation testing.
  • OS forced-colours mode and prefers-reduced-motion: reduce

The eight pages tested were chosen as representative of the site’s layout patterns: home, contact us, council members, calendar, meetings, minutes-and-agendas (most recent year), the most recent post, and the photo galleries.