Accessibility Statement

Technical information about this website’s accessibility

Suffolk.cloud (includes norfolk.cloud, essex.cloud and community.cloud) is committed to making its website templates and styles accessible in accordance with the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018.

We provide templated websites to parish councils using the Silverstripe Content Management System (CMS).

A suffolk.cloud website with standard page content is fully compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1 AA standard. This includes all templates supplied to parish councils for different page types.

Content that’s not within the scope of the accessibility regulations

Some of our parishes have older PDFs and Word documents that may 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).

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.

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

Live video

Live video streams do not have captions. This fails WCAG 2.1 success criterion 1.2.4 (captions - live).

We do not plan to add captions to live video streams because live video is exempt from meeting the accessibility regulations.

How we tested this website

Suffolk.cloud templates and styles were tested during December 2019 and January 2020.

All of our standard parish websites use shared templates and styles. In order to test our sites we created sample pages on a test site. We used the SiteImprove Accessibility Checker for the Chrome browser to conduct tests. We tested all of our templates using basic content and pictures. Our aim was to eliminate any errors or warnings found by site improve.

We have eliminated all errors apart from one false positive, one issue with a third party plugin and one issue with our search box.

These are:

1 - Label not connected to a form or control - we do not show the label for our search box to save space. The search box does contain a label added by javascript.

2 - Content not included in landmarks - the first of these occurrences is caused by our third-party cookie regulations plugin. The plugin does appear to conform to the WCAG guidelines but still generates an error. This is a free plugin and we think it is worth using rather than passing on additional costs to parishes.

3 - Content not included in landmarks - the second occurrence flags our skip to content link (not visible to people that aren't using a screen reader) although the link does appear to conform to the WCAG guidelines and has appropriate aria-label and role tags.

Issues flagged for review by the Site Improve plugin have been reviewed.

What we’re doing to improve accessibility

We are committed to maintaining adherence to accessibility standards. Any new templates we produce will be tested for WCAG AA conformance.