Accessibility statement for the Hampshire County Council website

Some older videos contain visual information with no audio description.

Some older pre-recorded media, such as audio-only or video-only content, does not have a suitable text alternative. Some users may not be able to access the information.

Hampshire County Council reviews and updates its media content production guidelines to ensure video and audio content includes an alternative, accessible method of accessing the information. New content is produced to these guidelines and older content is gradually being taken down or replaced.

Some of our pages use custom designed campaign assets. We have identified a number of accessibility issues with these designs, including:

• brand colour choices do not always have sufficient contrast
• page titles and headings are missing
• links do not contain any text
• video without audio is missing an accessible alternative
• hidden content can still be selected when navigating with a keyboard

The Comms Web team responsible for branded campaign sites have been notified of these issues and are working to resolve them. The County Council has also updated its guidance to help future designs ensure they meet web accessibility requirements.

An externally produced CQC scoring component used multiple times on the Community response teams page each contain the same link text but lead to different pages.

We are unable to amend this component directly. We are looking at splitting the page into smaller, focused pages so the link text is unique and makes more sense in context.

Some form fields do not have correctly associated labels. This means users of assistive technologies may not be able to clearly identify the purpose of each field.

Maintenance work is in progress to ensure all form fields have labels associated with them.

Some images are missing a text alternative.

Images and icons that are missing a text alternative are identified and fixed by the web content team as part of routine website maintenance. Guidance is issued to web editors to remind them that alternative text is required for all image uploads and why it is important.

An inline frames (or iframe) displays content from one web page on another web page.

The inline frames on these pages do not have a text name that describe their function to users with assistive technology:

• Planned road maintenance map
• Fostering training and support
• Hampshire Music Service careers

The contents of these iFrames are held externally to Hampshire County Council. We have reached out to the suppliers and requested the code is updated with a relevant text alternative.

Interactive components must be a minimum size and space apart to reduce incorrect inputs.

Some older interactive components do not meet the minimum size or spacing, such as the image slider used by Royal Victoria Country Park or the tick boxes and radio buttons in many of our older online forms.

We have reviewed these components. We are rolling out improvements to forms and minimising the use of non-compliant components elsewhere. Services responsible for branded sub-sites have also been informed that they should replace any non-compliant components.

Link text must clearly explain where the link will take the user. This text must also be available to assistive technology.

Some links on the website do not have a clear or accessible link text.

Links without clear or accessible link text are identified and fixed as part of routine website maintenance. Guidance is issued to editors across the council to ensure alternative text is provided for all links and to explain why this is important.

Some Hampshire County Council web pages use a 'microsite' template that introduces a secondary service navigation bar.

• The microsite service navigation bar collapses into a 'hamburger' menu on a mobile phone, small browser window or at 400% zoom. Once the hamburger menu is opened, the navigation is not accessible using a keyboard.
• Some navigation menu items open on pointer hover, but there is no way to close the options without moving pointer hover.

A rollout of a more accessible version of the mobile menu that resolves these issues is underway.

The mobile app does not change orientation when changing between portrait and landscape view.

This issue has been raised with the development team for further investigation.

All page titles, headings and subheadings must clearly describe the contents of the page or section they refer to.

Some pages, particularly in branded sub-sites (microsites) have heading that are unclear, lack sufficient detail or are missing entirely.

The services responsible for these pages have been informed that their pages must have meaningful and descriptive page titles and headings.

On the event search filter, the text in the 'on this date' field is partially cut off when text size or spacing is increased.

We have identified that the search component needs to be rebuilt with more space for the filters. Similar searches will also need to be redesigned.

The service picker component allows content from multiple pages to be served within a single page. It is currently in use on the Contact the council page.

• The headings of the second and third columns appear greyed out when they are not the active column. They do not have sufficient contrast with the background.
• Once you select an option using a keyboard, new options are revealed in the second column. Once the column is opened, the next tab does not continue in the second column, but continues down the list in the first column. This is not the expected behaviour.

We are actively removing all service picker components from the website.

Hampshire County Council uses a third party chat component for providing assistance through live chat or a chatbot.

• The link to the chatbot privacy policy does not have sufficient contrast against the background.
• The 'Live chat' button is an image of text that reads 'need help? chat now'. This should appear as live text.
• Pressing the 'need help? chat now' button opens a window to start the chat. You then have to tab backwards to reach the chat window. Focus should automatically be on the chat window.
• The programmatic name of the 'Live chat' button is 'Live chat' but the visible label is 'need help? chat now'.

We have notified the supplier of these issues. The supplier has been active in rolling out improvements to the webchat component.

Some live video streams do not have captions. This fails WCAG 2.2 1.2.4: Captions - live.

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

Users with low vision should be able to scale all text to 200% without losing any information. The small print used on our externally developed map widget does not always scale without clipping the text. This fails WCAG 2.2 1.4.4: Resize text.

Fixing this issue would require development of the external widget to meet WCAG 2.2, or replacing it with an alternative that meets the requirement. This will incur a significant cost. As the text being clipped is not the primary content intended for Hampshire County Council users, we do not see a need to replace the maps at this time. We will keep the maps under review as part of our ongoing web accessibility monitoring.

Many of our older PDFs and Word documents do not meet accessibility standards. They may not be structured so they're accessible to a screen reader. This does not meet WCAG 2.2 success criterion 4.1.2: Name, role value.

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. We plan to 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're not essential to providing our services.