Accessibility Statement

This accessibility statement applies to pitstone.co.uk, ivinghoe.co.uk and ivinghoeaston.co.uk all of which serve the same content.

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

  • 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)

We’ve also made the website text as simple as possible to understand.

AbilityNet has advice on making your device easier to use if you have a disability.

How accessible this website is

We know some parts of this website are not fully accessible:

  • you cannot modify the line height or spacing of text
  • most older PDF documents are not fully accessible to screen reader software

Feedback and contact information

If you need information on this website in a different format, please contact us and we will discuss your needs:

email: parishclerk@pitstone.co.uk
phone: 01296 767261

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:

Mrs Laurie Eagling
email: parishclerk@pitstone.co.uk
phone: 01296 767261

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).

Contacting us by phone or visiting us in person

We can be contacted by phone or email using details found here: Link to Contact Details

You can attend our meetings, details of which, along with other village events, can be found here: Link to Events Calendar

In person meetings can be arranged through the clerk.

Technical information about this website’s accessibility

Pitstone Parish Council 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

In general the site is compliant, however there may be issues with older content. Details are given in the Disproportionate Burden section below.

All new information added to the site will be fully accessible.

Disproportionate burden

The site contains information that primarily falls into these main categories:

  • Parish Council information
  • Parish Council news
  • Local information
  • Local news

The site retains all information added since it was first set up in 2013. Much of the information is out of date and could be removed, but we believe that it should remain available as a historical record of activities.

In general the information is text only and accessible, but may contain pages with accessibility issues. For example some pages may contain images of posters for past local events that do not have a text alternative.

Our site analytics show that, over the last year, most new pages have been accessed on average 5 to 10 times. Older pages are accessed rarely, if ever. We therefore believe that the effort required to check and fix these issues represents a disproportionate burden within the meaning of the accessibility regulations.

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

PDFs and other documents

Some of our PDFs and Word documents are essential to providing our services.

We publish the following documents as PDFs:

  • Council Agendas
  • Council Minutes
  • Council Policies
  • Council Procedures
  • Council Forms (where a signed, paper response is required)

Historically, these documents were accessible but may not contain all the required structural tagging.

To meet transparency regulations we also publish financial information in editable form, typically Excel.

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

Our policies and procedures are reviewed annually and will be updated to be accessible as and when they are reviewed. This process will be completed by September 2021.

What we’re doing to improve accessibility

We will continue to review the accessibility status of the site. Where new technologies allow greater accessibility to be achieved we will seek to deploy them where possible.

Preparation of this accessibility statement

This statement was prepared on 15th September 2020. It was last reviewed on 15th September 2020.

This website was last tested on 12th September 2020. The test was carried out by ourselves.

We used this approach to deciding on a sample of pages to test:

The site is built using the WordPress engine and has a number of standard page types for different purposes. All pages are built from templates. Several pages of each type were checked.