South Norfolk Leisure Website Accessibility Policy

Disproportionate burden

PDFs and other documents

We have prioritised making accessible existing PDFs and other documents (eg in Word) published from January 2021 on www.southnorfolkandbroadland.gov.uk as well as making any new documents that we publish complaint. All documents (PDF, Word format etc) that are downloadable forms used for active administrative processes will be made compliant irrespective of their original publication date. We want to keep PDFs and other documents on the website for public transparency and will provide alternative versions upon request.

We have undertaken a detailed assessment and estimate in total for both councils (Broadland District Council and South Norfolk Council) that approximately 1784 PDF documents remain non-compliant. It takes approximately 3 hours to review and make a document accessible. To fix the 1784 documents that are within scope would take approximately 723 working days at a cost of approximately £100,324 in staff costs. The majority of these documents have not been viewed by a member of the public or have received very few views. However, we keep them on the website for public transparency and will provide alternative versions upon request. We believe that the cost of retrospectively fixing these documents would be a disproportionate burden within the meaning of the Accessibility Regulations 2018, ie, to fix all documents on www.southnorfolkandbroadland.gov.uk that have a publication date from 23 September 2018. Furthermore, we believe the benefit to the public in assigning staff or procuring external support to fix these documents would not be justifiable use of the public purse and users would instead benefit most from us focusing on fixing more recent most used documents and ensuring that new documents are accessible.

The PDFs relating to the development of the Village Clusters Housing Allocations Plan are partially compliant with WCAG 2.1 AA standards however we have taken all the steps we can towards compliance. This includes:

• • PDF and accessible documents training for staff, provided by AbilityNet

• • Using automated and manual checking tools to remediate issues, such as Adobe Acrobat DC and Microsoft Word Accessibility Checker

If requested, we can provide the PDFs in alternative formats.

Third party software and systems

Some online services we offer use software that is built and maintained by third party suppliers on our behalf. We have been working with suppliers to establish timescales and costs for compliance. The following outlines the current status of what has been done and what we believe would be a disproportionate burden within the meaning of the accessibility regulations to fix at this time. We will make another assessment as supplier contracts come up for renewal. We are also reviewing systems as part of a corporate-wide programme of work to align IT systems across Broadland District Council and South Norfolk Council. The initial findings from the review are expected in June 2021 from which individual system timescales can then be developed:

Broadland District Council systems

• • Planning Explorer and Payment Portal: We’ve assessed the cost of fixing the issues with interactive tools and transactions on these systems. We believe that retrospectively fixing these issues at this time would be a disproportionate burden within the meaning of the accessibility regulations. These systems are in the scope of our review on aligning IT systems across both councils

South Norfolk Council systems

• • Planning Portal and Local Land Charges: The third party suppliers do not currently have an accessible version of the software. These systems are in the scope of our review on aligning IT systems across both councils

• • Payment portal: We’ve fixed the issues with interactive tools and transactions on our Payment Portal, however we are aware the Visa and Mastercard verification service used when processing payments remains non-compliant. We are working with our current software provider to understand how this can be addressed

• • Council Tax: The supplier has confirmed their version is compliant but our checks have found otherwise, possibly due to customisation for our site. We are investigating this currently.

• • Leisure system: We’ve assessed the cost of fixing the issues with interactive tools and transactions on our Leisure system. We believe that fixing these issues would at this time be a disproportionate burden within the meaning of the accessibility regulations

Both councils

• • Electronic forms (including our front-end forms to third party systems): We’ve assessed the cost of fixing the issues with the electronic forms. We believe that fixing these issues would be a disproportionate burden within the meaning of the accessibility regulations. We have instead invested all our time and resources into building a new forms solution to meet all our accessibility needs for the future. We are actively redeveloping our forms into the new platform focusing on those forms which are most frequently used by our customers

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

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. For example, we do not plan to fix Joint Core Strategy (adopted 2011, amendments adopted 2014). However, we want to keep PDFs and other documents on the website for public transparency and will provide alternative versions upon request.

We are also not required by the regulations to fix documents provided by third-parties that are neither funded nor developed by, nor under the control of the Council. 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 have worked with our website supplier to ensure that templates used by web content editors are accessible and responsive. We have trained web content editors on accessible content and have engaged Abilitynet to develop and provide practical training in accessible document production for all staff across the council.

We have set up processes so that this website is continually tested.

Preparation of this accessibility statement

This statement was prepared on 27 May 2021. It was last updated on 28 March 2022.

This website was last tested on 15 November 2021. The test was carried out by our Siteimprove automated process producing reports and content editor guidance. We use Siteimprove manual testing for satellite sites related to this digital service.

We use this approach in deciding on sample of pages to test where they have been highlighted as having accessibility issues through the automated monitoring and reporting on content accessibility.

We test:

• • our main website platform, available at https://www.southnorfolkandbroadland.gov.uk and our leisure website at https://www.southnorfolkleisure.co.uk

• • our online forms systems at https://forms.southnorfolkandbroadland.gov.uk and https://secure.broadland.gov.uk (subdomain names provided for information only.

These are not linked to on this page because it would cause an error unless linked to a specific form).