Accessibility Statement for Dartford Borough Council:

Using this website:

This accessibility statement applies to all of our '*.dartford.gov.uk' public websites, Dartford Borough Council also operates the following online platforms:

Dartford Business Awards

Dartford Business Awards (Facebook)

Dartford Business Awards (Twitter)

Dartford Together (Facebook)

Dartford Together (Twitter)

Dartford Together (Instagram)

This website is run by Dartford 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:

  • 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’re always improving the website text to make it as simple as possible to understand.

Dartford Borough Council does not make use of public facing web applications.

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

How accessible this website is:

We know some parts of this website are not fully accessible:

  • A number of third party applications still have issues which the suppliers are working to resolve
  • A number of PDFs hosted on this website have not been made accessible and suitable for website publishing
  • The wording used within many pages of this website do not meet the recommended reading age
  • The website has a number of broken links
  • The alt text is missing on some images within the site
  • Some objects within the website lack headings

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:

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

If you cannot view the map on our ‘contact us’ page, call us on 01322 343434 for directions.

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 you think we’re not meeting accessibility requirements: 

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).

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.

Find out how to contact Dartford council

Technical information about this website’s accessibility:

Dartford 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 partially compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1 AA standard, due to non-compliances listed on this page:

How we test our website:

A sample set of pages are tested every week by an independent third-party specialist company called Sitemorse, and ad-hoc testing of the entire site is completed at random intervals by Dartford Borough Council, using third party tools

Our main website platform this quarter (Q4 2023) was ranked 180th out of 391 councils with the overall score remaining at 5.8/10 in the SiteMorse Accessibility and Code Compliance rankings (Sitemorse accessibility index)

Non-accessible content:

Non-compliance with the accessibility regulations and supplier statements:

  • (Committee and Councillors) This system is now running the latest version of the software with new accessibility features, however the PDFs still require considerable work and a number of pages require titles and work on contrast: Committee server
  • (Planning System) This system is now considered to be double A compliant, however the PDFs still require considerable work and maps cannot be made accessible due to their nature, a number of pages don't have their headings in the correct order and a number of landmarks are missing: Public access server
  • The Parish Council websites: A number of these do not comply with the required accessibility standards. Each parish is responsible for its own website
  • A number of PDFs hosted on this website have not been made accessible and suitable for website publishing
  • The wording used within the pages of this website do not meet the recommended reading age
  • The alt text is missing on numerous images within the site
  • Several objects within the website lack headings

Issues with PDFs and other documents:

Many of our PDFs don't meet accessibility standards for the following reasons:

Issue

Success criteria failed

Location

Ensure PDFs are machine readable

WCAG A 1.1.1

All non-text content that is presented to the user has a text alternative that serves the equivalent purpose

A number of PDFs are not machine readable.

Specify headings for every PDF

WCAG A 1.3.1

Information, structure, and relationships conveyed through presentation can be programmatically determined or are available in text

A number of PDFs do not specify a heading.

Fix untagged PDFs

WCAG A 1.3.1

As above

A number of PDFs are untagged

Define a title for all PDFs

WCAG A 2.4.2

Web pages have titles that describe topic or purpose

A number of PDFs do not specify the document title using the Title entry in the document information dictionary.

Ensure PDFs specify a default language

WCAG A 3.1.1

The default human language of each Web page can be programmatically determined

A number of PDFs specify a default language.

We are actively working to fix errors within PDFs as part of our overall drive to improve accessibility. Where a PDF page with errors falls within the top 10% of most frequently accessed pages we aim to fix it by May 2024. For more information on this please refer to the ‘What we’re doing to improve accessibility’ paragraph below.

Text Relay and readability:

If you would like to contact someone within the Council and you have speech difficulties, then you can contact the council using the Contact the Customer Services Team form

If you have a text phone you may wish to contact us through Text Relay.

We still have much work to do in making this web site easily readable using 'plain English'. If necessary, text can be made larger by doing the following:

Hold down <CTRL> and press '+' to increase the font size or hold down <CTRL> and press '-' to decrease the font size. Hold down <CTRL> and press '0' to return the browser back to the default font size. This is supported by the following browsers:

Google Chrome

Mozilla Firefox

Safari

Microsoft Edge

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

Any PDFs supplied by third parties such as consultation type responses for which we have no legal editorial rights.

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.

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

To enable the viewing and downloading (saving) of these documents you will require Adobe Reader.

The latest version of Adobe Reader includes accessibility support for people with visual impairment or motor disabilities.

You can download Adobe Reader free of charge

What we’re doing to improve accessibility:

We have increased the resources we have available for improving accessibility and are putting a larger proportion of our time into making our website compliant and as accessible as possible.

We are carrying out regular internal content audits to review out of date/unnecessary content and we are identifying/fixing issues with the help of a monthly accessibility report. We are also working with all our staff who are responsible for writing content for the website, to train them in producing more accessible content and to improve all the content already up on the site that has issues. In tandem, we are putting further rigour into our approval processes in order to improve quality.

A content audit and check with our CMS provider is due to start very soon and we expect this will clear up many of the template-related issues facing our website, while we continue to work with and support web editors to review content and fix other outstanding issues. 

We expect a large number of inaccessible PDFs to be removed from our website by May 2024.

Preparation of this accessibility statement:

This statement was prepared on 21 April 2023.

This website was last tested on 4 December 2023.

The statement was last reviewed on 19 December 2023.

The statement was last updated on 19 December 2023.

The statement was last updated on 18 March 2024. 

The statement will next be reviewed on 18 June 2024.