Harrow council website is less disability friendly for some as ‘accessibility’ is failing to meet all website regulations, so we hear.
Concern is that disabled people with weak eye-sight, partial blindness, colour blindness, deafness and those depending on hearing could find themselves unable to access vital services and digital information.
The accessibility page on the council website informs partial or non-compliance in a number of areas:
Some images do not have a text alternative. Therefore, people using a screen reader cannot access the information.
Some maps are hard to navigate for screen reader users. Some website element colours do not currently adhere to the colour standards, and some of the PDF content on the website is not fully readable.
The council says that “We want as many people as possible to be able to use this website” but we could find no instructions or interactive commands to change colours, contrast levels and fonts, zoom in, navigate most of the website using just a keyboard, navigate most of the website using speech recognition software or to listen to most of the website using a screen reader. The video streaming for the public has no captions for deaf people.
While a browser’s settings on a device could help, but this is not the answer where the device has multiple users or the user lacks software knowledge.
Wonder what stops the council making its website fully compliant with the A, AA, AAA, the three levels of conformance in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to make web content more accessible to people with disabilities, and to provide instructions or interactive commands for all disabled people to benefit from the website contents.
In responding, Harrow council said, “We have been working hard on improving accessibility of the website over the past 3 years, which is a challenge with a website the size of harrow.gov. We are now over 95% compliance with A and AA WCAG guidelines and are continuing to work hard, particularly on the accessibility of Pdf’s”.
Concern is that disabled people with weak eye-sight, partial blindness, colour blindness, deafness and those depending on hearing could find themselves unable to access vital services and digital information.
The accessibility page on the council website informs partial or non-compliance in a number of areas:
Some images do not have a text alternative. Therefore, people using a screen reader cannot access the information.
Some maps are hard to navigate for screen reader users. Some website element colours do not currently adhere to the colour standards, and some of the PDF content on the website is not fully readable.
The council says that “We want as many people as possible to be able to use this website” but we could find no instructions or interactive commands to change colours, contrast levels and fonts, zoom in, navigate most of the website using just a keyboard, navigate most of the website using speech recognition software or to listen to most of the website using a screen reader. The video streaming for the public has no captions for deaf people.
While a browser’s settings on a device could help, but this is not the answer where the device has multiple users or the user lacks software knowledge.
Wonder what stops the council making its website fully compliant with the A, AA, AAA, the three levels of conformance in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to make web content more accessible to people with disabilities, and to provide instructions or interactive commands for all disabled people to benefit from the website contents.
In responding, Harrow council said, “We have been working hard on improving accessibility of the website over the past 3 years, which is a challenge with a website the size of harrow.gov. We are now over 95% compliance with A and AA WCAG guidelines and are continuing to work hard, particularly on the accessibility of Pdf’s”.
Harrow Monitoring Group 