for the Flood Toolkit (floodtoolkit.com)
This accessibility statement applies to the website at floodtoolkit.com.
This website is a shared resource for North and West Northamptonshire Councils. 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 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:
- Some interactive infographic tools created for the website are not navigable entirely by keyboard
- some older PDF documents may not be fully accessible to screen reader software
- some video streams do not yet have manually generated captions
Feedback and contact information
If you need information on this website in a different format like accessible PDF, large print or braille:
We’ll consider your request and get back to you in 10 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: Floodandwater.ncc@westnorthants.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
North and West Northamptonshire Councils are 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’ or ‘exemptions’ listed below.
Non-accessible content
The content listed below is non-accessible for the following reasons.
Non-compliance with the accessibility regulations
- some content of the PDFs downloadable from this website may not be fully accessible with screen reader technology or accessibility requirements
- embedded video on this website includes automated captions/subtitles, but not verified, manually generated captions/subtitles
- the Education section toolkit originally developed for the website by a third-party developer contains a missing label and an empty link within navigational elements
Disproportionate burden
We have assessed that it would be a disproportionate burden to fix all inaccessible documents published since September 2018, due to the low level of usage for the majority of documents.
We believe that the benefit to our website visitors of assigning staff to fix all documents in scope of the regulations on the floodtoolkit.com website would not be justified, given how infrequently the majority of these documents are accessed, and would impose a disproportionate burden on West and North Northamptonshire Councils. To make all documents in scope of the regulations accessible would take up a huge amount of resource. We believe this resource would be better allocated to concentrating on making new content and documents accessible, as well as ensuring all content and documents created for the new unitary websites are accessible.
Content that’s not within the scope of the accessibility regulations
The interactive Flood Risk Map tools, like most mapping tools, is not designed to be navigated using the keyboard and has limited accessibility to screen reader tools. Please contact Floodandwater.ncc@westnorthants.gov.uk if you cannot access the map and require this information.
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 flood investigations.
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.
The Local Flood Risk Management Strategy is due to be reviewed in 2021. In light of this, we believe it would be a disproportionate burden to fix this inaccessible document as it would take up a huge amount of resource. We believe this resource would be better allocated to concentrating on reviewing the Strategy as planned and ensuring that the content in that will be accessible.
Any new PDFs or Word documents we publish will meet accessibility standards.
What we’re doing to improve accessibility
In April 2021, Northamptonshire’s existing county, borough and district councils will be replaced by two councils – one for the west of the county and one for the north. We will balance our efforts between making our existing website more accessible wherever possible and helping to ensure any new unitary website under our control is accessible to all.
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. However, we are looking into how we can make all future PDFs uploaded to the flood toolkit accessible to all.
Preparation of this accessibility statement
This statement was prepared on 11 September 2020. It was last reviewed on 15 September 2020.
This website was last tested on 11 September 2020. The test was carried out by Pooka & Co Ltd.
A sample of main pages on the website were reviewed using the WebAim WAVE accessibility evaluation tool (https://wave.webaim.org/). Where the WAVE tool reported errors, these were resolved by the website developer wherever possible. Where this has not been possible, these areas of the site are detailed above.
