Accessibility statement

As part of our commitment to accessibility we are required to publish where we know there are issues with our website.

Content missing after headings

Content should appear as expected including between headings of the same level and after the last section or page heading. Missing content after a heading fails accessibility best practice.

ARIA attribute unsupported or prohibited

ARIA attributes give the user information about the behaviour of interactive elements. For example, to tell screen-reader users whether a checkbox is checked or unchecked. Unsupported ARIA attributes can result in poor user experience or break the usability of a site.

This fails WAI-ARIA authoring practices.

Issues with text

Some links state ‘link’ in the alternative text or aria label – screen readers are therefore repeating this twice. For example ‘link, contact us link’.

Some links have link text as well as a combination of titles, aria labels and alternative text. As a result when read using a screen reader it reads the same or a similar thing multiple times for each link. This is dependent on screen-reader settings.

We're working on fixing these issues as soon as possible. When we publish new content we’ll make sure link text meets accessibility standards.

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.

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 currently plan to fix historic meeting minutes as we need to prioritise other areas.

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

Images, video and audio

Not all of our video content has captions.

Other accessibility issues

Some aria-labels and WAI-ARIA roles may be incorrect or not as useful as they could be. Our automated checks are able to check whether they exist, but are not able to tell us if they are useful in their given context.

Exemptions

There are some types of content that are exempt from accessibility regulations. All exemptions that relate to our website are listed here:

• third-party content that is neither funded nor developed by, nor under the control of Birmingham City Council. e.g. content and services supplied by GOV.UK or NHS.UK
• PDFs and documents published before 23 September 2018 which are not essential for providing a particular service or active administrative process. However, we are actively working towards reducing the number of inaccessible PDFs and replacing them with accessible alternatives
• pre-recorded time-based media (videos and audio recordings) is exempt from the regulations if it was published before 23 September 2020

What we’re doing to fix accessibility issues

We have limited resources but are committed to making our websites compliant and as accessible as possible.

We are also working with staff members who write content for our websites, training them to produce more accessible content and improve existing inaccessible content.

Something missing?

If you believe that something is missing from this list, tell us by email at UXcontent@birmingham.gov.uk. You should be as specific and detailed as you can.

You can also tell us if you had a good experience on our website.