Accessibility Statement

This accessibility statement applies to https://www.darlington-safeguarding-partnership.co.uk/. This website is run by Darlington 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 200% 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)

AbilityNet has advice on making your device easier to use if you have a disability.

How accessible this website is

Most of this website is compliant with the W3C WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility standard.  However, there are some parts of this website that are not fully accessible:

• Legacy PDF documents from the old website.
• The first tab in our accordions wrong states that its open when its closed to assistive technologies.

What to do if you can’t access parts of this website

If you need information on this website in a different format like accessible PDF, large print, easy read, audio recording or braille:

• email mydarlington@darlington.gov.uk

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 accessibility requirements, contact the Web team by emailing the issue to mydarlington@darlington.gov.uk. 

Enforcement procedure

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) is responsible for enforcing the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018 (the ‘accessibility regulations’). If you’re not happy with how we respond to your complaint, contact the Equality Advisory and Support Service (EASS).

Technical information about this website’s accessibility

Darlington Borough Council is committed to making its website's accessible, in accordance with the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018.

This website is mostly compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.2 AA standard, due to the non-compliances listed below.

Non accessible content

The content listed below is non-accessible for the following reasons.

• A lot of our PDF documents have not been created in an accessible way that makes them easy for assistive technologies to navigate and understand them. 

Non compliance with the accessibility regulations

Legacy PDF documents

Most of the documents on this site were migrated over from the previous Darlington Safeguarding Boards website. A number of these documents do not reach the required accessibility standard. 87 of the current 89 documents that were published after the 23/09/2018 deadline will need to be fixed.

We aim to replace these documents with accessible versions by 23 September 2020.

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

Migrated documents published before 23/09/2018

These documents don’t meet accessibility standards as they are not structured to be accessible to a screen reader. This doesn’t meet WCAG 2.1 success criterion 4.1.2 (name, role value). 

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.

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

How we tested this website

This website is tested every 10 days. The tests are carried out by the Darlington Borough Council web team using Siteimprove’s accessibility reports.  Tests are scheduled automatically and are monitored by the web team.

What we are doing to improve accessibility

Our accessibility road map below shows how we aim to improve accessibility across this website.

This statement was prepared on 03/01/2020.  It was last update on 09/10/2024 and will be reviewed every four months.