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Accessibility statement

On 1 April the single new council for North Yorkshire launched replacing Scarborough Borough Council and other local authorites in North Yorkshire.

To find your Councillor or to view minutes, meetings and agendas please visit the North Yorkshire Council website.

Accessibility statement for Scarborough.gov.uk

This accessibility statement applies to scarborough.gov.uk.

This website is run by Scarborough Borough 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

This website is regularly checked by  Sitemorse® ContentQA, an independent benchmark service, however, we know some parts of this website aren’t fully accessible:

  • most older PDF documents aren’t fully accessible to screen reader software
  • live video streams don’t have captions

Feedback and contact information

If you need information on this website in a different format like accessible PDF, large print, easy read, audio recording or braille contact us using the request option our website feedback form

We’ll consider your request and get back to you in 10 working days.

Reporting accessibility problems with this website

We’re always looking to improve the accessibility of this website. If you find any problems that aren’t listed on this page or think we’re not meeting the requirements of the accessibility regulations, please contact us using the feedback option on our website feedback form.

Enforcement procedure

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).
 

Contacting us by phone or visiting us in person

We provide a text relay service for people who are D/deaf, hearing impaired or have a speech impediment.

Our offices have audio induction loops, or if you contact us before your visit, we can arrange a British Sign Language (BSL) interpreter.

Contact us to discuss the services we offer.

Technical information about this website’s accessibility

Scarborough Borough 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 fully compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1 AA standard.

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

PDFs and other documents

Many of our older PDFs and Word documents don’t meet accessibility standards - for example, they may not be marked up so they’re accessible to a screen reader.

Some of our PDFs and Word documents are essential to providing our services. For example, we have PDFs with information on how users can access our services, and forms published as Word documents. By September 2021, we plan to either fix these or replace them with accessible HTML pages.

The accessibility 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. For example, we don’t plan to fix freedom of information responses.

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

This website is tested weekly to check our compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1 AA standards. Our tests are carried out by  Sitemorse® ContentQA.

We test:

Preparation of this accessibility statement

This statement was prepared on 21/08/2020. It was last reviewed on 26/03/2021.

This website was last tested on  . The test was carried out by Sitemorse on behalf of Scarborough Borough Council.

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

https://sitemorse.com/blog-article/9668/Developer-Corner-How-Sitemorse-assesses-a-site/

  • Top 125 pages of the site https://www.scarborough.gov.uk/ are assessed each week
  • The site is spidered from the Homepage by following the clickable links
  • Categories for each page assessed include Accessibility and Code Quality. Accessibility is assessed according to automated diagnostics as defined by WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) checks

We test this website internally, in the following ways:

  • colour contrast checkers

We carry out our testing based on a sample of pages that includes a variety of layouts, styles and functionality.