Accessibility statement

As part of our commitment to accessibility we are required to publish where we know there are issues with our website.

Issues with text

Some links state ‘link’ in the alternative text or aria label – screen readers are therefore repeating this twice. For example ‘link, contact us link’.

Some links have link text as well as a combination of titles, aria labels and alternative text. As a result when read using a screen reader it reads the same or a similar thing multiple times for each link. This is dependent on screen reader settings

We're working on fixing these issues as soon as possible. When we publish new content we’ll make sure link text meets accessibility standards.

Issues with PDFs and other documents

Many of our older PDFs and Word documents don’t meet accessibility standards - for example, they may not be marked up so they’re accessible to a screen reader.

The accessibility regulations don’t require us to fix PDFs or other documents published before 23 September 2018 if they’re not essential to providing our services. For example, we don’t currently plan to fix historic meeting minutes as we need to prioritise other areas.

Any new PDFs or Word documents we publish will meet accessibility standards.

Issues with images, video and audio

Not all of our video content has captions.

Other accessibility issues

Some aria-labels and WAI-ARIA roles may be incorrect or not as useful as they could be. Our automated checks are able to check whether they exist, but are not able to tell us if they are useful in their given context.

Exemptions

There are some types of content that are exempt from accessibility regulations. All exemptions that relate to our website are listed here:

• Third-party content that is neither funded nor developed by, nor under the control of Birmingham City Council. e.g. content and services supplied by GOV.UK or NHS.UK.
• PDFs and documents published before 23 September 2018 which are not essential for providing a particular service or active administrative process. However, we are actively working towards reducing the number of inaccessible PDFs and replacing them with accessible alternatives.
• Pre-recorded time-based media (videos and audio recordings) is exempt from the regulations if it was published before 23 September 2020.

What we’re doing to fix accessibility issues

We have a plan in place and are working to fix these issues. We have limited resources but are putting a large proportion of our time into making our websites compliant and as accessible as possible.

We are also working with all our staff who are responsible for writing content for our websites, to train them in producing more accessible content and to improve all the content already up on the site that has issues.

Something missing?

If you believe that something is missing from this list, please contact us and be as specific and detailed as you can. Please also tell us if you had a good experience on our website.