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  Accessibility statement for AfC Info 

This accessibility statement applies to the AfCinfo (incorporating the SEND Local Offer) website for Kingston and Richmond.

This website is run by Achieving for Children. We want as many people as possible to be able to use this website. For example, that means you should be able to:

  • change colours, contrast levels and fonts.
  • 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)
How accessible this website is
We know some parts of this website are not fully accessible:
  • Some third-party plugins such as Google Maps, Google Captcha and YouTube iframes 
  • The navigation bar may obscure focus elements when using a keyboard to navigate through the site
Requesting information in other formats
If you need information on this website in a different format please contact us:
We’ll consider your request and get back to you in 7 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 us on the details above.

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

Achieving for Children 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 2.1 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

We have done everything within our power to make the website comply but some third-party plugins such as Google Maps, Google Recaptcha, and YouTube video embeds that are used on this website do not meet WCAG 2.1 - success criterion 4.1.1 (parsing) and / or success criterion 4.1.2 (name, role, value); 1.4.3: Contrast (Minimum) and 1.1.1 Non-text Content - and must be resolved by said third parties. As such, we cannot be sure when these issues will be resolved.

As some of the content does not contain image alt tags, not all images have an appropriate text equivalent and some essential visual information may not be available as text. This doesn’t meet WCAG 2.1 success criterion 1.1.1 (non-text content). 

Disproportionate burden

Not applicable

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

PDFs and other documents: some of our PDFs and Word documents may be essential to providing our services.

For example we may have PDFs with information on how users can access our services, and forms published as Word documents.  We are working through the site to review these and if relevant, either fix these or replace them with accessible HTML pages.

The accessibility regulations do not require us to fix PDFs or other documents published before 23 September 2018 if they are not essential to providing our services. For example, we do not plan to fix Emotional Health Service leaflet on Exam Stress (pdf)

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

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

What we’re doing to improve accessibility

We are working continously to review the website text to use plain English and make it simple to understand.  This aspect is challenging due to the wide range of contributors of information to the website and the complexity and volume of information contained within it.  We are committed to challenging ourselves, improving the way we provide information, to understand accessibility and do better. 

We are educating our services to understand that information should be explained simply as text on a page. If supplementary ways of providing information are provided, we will ensure that they are presented in an accessible format. This might be ensuring that videos have subtitles and provided with a transcript. 

We are limiting the amount of images we use. When we do use images on webpages we will provide alt text.  We make sure that no essential information is contained within an image. 

We are making hyperlinked text accessible.

We are removing PDFs provided by external agencies or replacing downloaded PDFs with links to the PDFs on the external providers website. This is because we recognise that some advice and guidance provided by external agencies is relevant and helpful to users of our site. However, the responsibility to make that content accessible sits with the content owner. 

We have invested in the Recite Me accessibility tool which is available on our website.  We recognise that this tool does not contribute to our work to make our website comply with accessibility regulations. However, user feedback suggested that some users would find this tool helpful. This is particularly relevant to people that require information in languages other than English. 

Room for improvement
We recognise there is room for improvement, particularly in the following areas: Content and functionality from third parties. 
 
We monitor other websites to assess best practice for website accessibility on an ongoing basis and we work with external vendors to ensure the solutions they provide us with are as accessible as possible.
 
Developments to the website in line with user feedback about accessibility will be evaluated in line with what is likely to make the largest impact to our users and the cost of achieving these objectives.
Preparation of this accessibility statement

This statement was prepared on 28th August 2020. It was last reviewed in July 2022.

Testing the website

The test was carried out by This is Focus Limited, using https://alphagov.github.io/wcag-primer/checklist.html#checklist and the ARC Toolkit. We used this approach to test a sample of key pages, actions and user journeys against the above checklist.
View the full report.