Website accessibility

This accessibility statement applies to Waltham Forest Council's main website and My Account, our online service portal.

It does not apply to any other Waltham Forest websites. For example: builtenvironment.walthamforest.gov.uk, eclaim.walthamforest.gov.uk.

The London Borough of Waltham Forest runs this website. We want as many people as possible to be able to use this website. That means you should be able to:

• change colours, contrast levels, and fonts using browser or device settings
• zoom in up to 300% without the text spilling off the screen
• navigate most of the website using a keyboard or speech recognition software
• listen to most of the website using a screen reader like JAWS, NVDA or 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.

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

• the web code used on GovService, our forms system, has some issues
• headings on the main website are incorrectly structured; heading levels have been skipped on some pages
• not all the videos on the site have captions
• a virtual tour of one of our services has accessibility issues

If you find any accessibility problems not listed on this page or think we’re not meeting accessibility requirements, then let us know by emailing web.site@walthamforest.gov.uk.

If you need information on this website in a different format like accessible PDF, large print, easy read, audio recording or braille then please email web.site@walthamforest.gov.uk.

We’ll consider your request and get back to you in 5 days.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) is responsible for enforcing the accessibility regulations. If you’re not happy with how we respond to your complaint, contact the Equality Advisory and Support Service (EASS).

The London Borough of Waltham Forest is committed to making its website accessible, in accordance with the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018.

This website is partially compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.2 AA standard, due to the issues listed below.

Our forms system

Our main online forms processes have been created using Granicus’ GovService. Our forms have these issues:

• some form elements are not accessible to keyboard users (success criterion 2.1.1 keyboard)
• the keyboard focus is not clear enough (criterion 2.4.7 focus visible)
• some buttons and formatting used on forms have insufficient colour contrast (criterion 1.4.3)
• some of the HTML used is incorrect. For example: malformed lists; some IDs used in ARIA and labels are not unique; some form elements do not have a visible label; the search button has no discernible text (criterion 4.1)

Our developers are fixing these issues.

Text and formatting

Our website currently has issues with:

• headings on the main website are incorrectly structured; heading levels have been skipped on some pages (criterion 1.3.1 info and relationships)
• link text is poorly written (criterion 2.4.4 link purpose)
• links to the council's social media accounts are missing accessibility information (criterion 2.4.4 link purpose)

This issue can cause particular problems for people who use the keyboard or by text-to-speech software to navigate our site.

We aim to address this by:

• changing our website's code to fix the issues with skipped headings and generic link text
• providing training to our content editors so they can fix content issues caused by, for example, skipped headings, and poor link text
• setting up our website CMS so these issues can be quickly identified and fixed

PDFs

Many of our older PDFs and Word documents don’t meet accessibility standards. And some of our PDFs and Word documents are essential to providing our services (multiple success criteria).

We have removed approximately 2,100 documents from the website and have around 2,800 to do. With these we are working to either:

• remove them from the site
• convert to a more accessible format, or
• fix their accessibility issues

We aim to complete this work by March 2024.

We understand that the 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. But if you do need the information in another format, please let us know by emailing web.site@walthamforest.gov.uk.

Issues with video

Not all the videos on our website are subtitled or have transcriptions. (criterion 1.2.2 captions prerecorded)

Work is being done with council services to ensure accessible videos are created as a matter of course.

Interactive content: Virtual tours

There is an interactive virtual tour on the site that is not fully accessible.

Work is being done with the service to improve its accessibility.

We are improving the accessibility of the website by:

• carrying out accessibility testing with local disabled residents to see how we can make the site easier to use
• training and supporting staff who publish information on the website

We also continue to monitor the site's accessibility using automated and manual checks.

We are working with council services and external suppliers to improve the accessibility of the council's online services.

How we test this website

The site is regularly checked for accessibility issues as set out in to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2.

We do by:

• using Monsido, an automatic tool which checks our our site every week
• testing the site with local disabled people
• manually checking for, and fixing any issues we find

This statement was created on 19 October 2021. It was last reviewed on 14 October 2024.

The site was last tested on 13 October 2024 against the WCAG 2.2 AA standard. The test carried out by an automated test tool. It was last tested manually in August 2024 by our website team.