Accessibility statement for Chelmsford City Council

We are committed to providing a website that is accessible to as many users as possible. Here we have given our accessibility advice and our accessibility statement.

This accessibility statement applies to www.chelmsford.gov.uk

This website is run by Chelmsford City Council.

We want as many people as possible to be able to use this website. For example, that means you should be able to:

  • change colours, contrast levels and fonts
  • 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. This includes how to:

How accessible this website is

We know some parts of this website aren't fully accessible:

  • 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 like accessible PDF, large print, easy read, audio recording or braille, you can:

We’ll consider your request and respond back to you in ten working days.

Reporting accessibility problems with this website

We are 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, you can contact the Web Team.

Enforcement procedure

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) is responsible for enforcing the accessibility regulations.

If you are not happy with how we respond to your complaint, you can contact the Equality Advisory and Support Service (EASS).

Contacting us

You can call us on 01245 606886. You can also contact us online.

Technical information about this website's accessibility

Chelmsford City 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

We have a small number of embedded videos on our site. Some of these do not have captions.

Some of the images on our site do not display appropriate alt-text. This fails WCAG 2.1 success criterion 1.1.1 (non-text content).

We will review all images to add any missing alt-text, and when we publish new content, we’ll make sure images meet accessibility standards.

Interactive tools and transactions

We are aware that some internal applications and externally hosted systems do not comply with accessibility and usability standards.

We will work with our suppliers to improve the accessibility of these sites as much as possible.

Some parts of this site link to or use content provided by other websites and these are not always as accessible as our site. Examples include:

  • YouTube videos
  • Google Maps

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

PDFs and other documents

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 our older committee documents.

We publish all essential service information in an accessible web page and provide contact details for alternative versions.

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

If you need information in an alternative format, you can contact the Web Team.

What we're doing to improve accessibility

This statement was published on 27 September 2022.

We continuously monitor our website’s accessibility based on automated testing. We have developed, and stringently follow, a style guide to ensure all our content is easy to read and is written in an accessible way.

The Chelmsford City Council website was rated as ‘great’ or ‘excellent’ in the Silktide Index in 2021 and 2022.

We are working with suppliers to resolve any identified accessibility issues where we do not have direct control over their product.

Readspeaker (speech enabling)

In the top bar of every page, in the header, you will see a ‘Listen' link. This service will read out the text of any of our web pages.

This can help many people, including people with visual impairments, people with dyslexia, low literacy, or people whose first language is not English.

Preparation of this accessibility statement

This statement was first prepared on 27 September 2022. 

This website was last tested on 20 September 2022. The test was carried out by the Web Team at Chelmsford City Council.

We tested this website using the automated testing tools on SiteImprove, which reports its findings to us every week.

SiteImprove checks across the whole of our site on a regular basis and reports on:

  • pages that conform to WCAG A, AA or AAA standards
  • issues with CSS validation
  • issues with HTML validation
  • PDF accessibility including problems with tagging, language definition, headings and labels

Is there something wrong with this page?

You can report issues with the website using our website feedback form, which will go directly to the Web Team. This team will be unable to deal with your enquiry if it is not related to the website.