Our third-party website requirements

As a third-party provider you need to be aware of and have an understanding of the accessibility requirements (GOV.UK). All third-party websites or systems purchased or developed on behalf of us will need to fully meet The Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018. 

As a council if we do not fully comply we will be discriminating against a large proportion of our users and could be held in breach of the Equality Act 2010.

Some websites or systems may also need a privacy notice produced if it is collecting any data or personal details on behalf of the council. 

We no longer accept any new material that does not meet the accessibility requirements.

Anyone developing any content such as documents, images, videos or podcasts for inclusion on our websites or systems must make sure that the content is fully accessible to all individuals, including those with disabilities. For example videos should contain closed captions and a transcript and images should have alternative text (Alt text) added to them.

The Web Accessibility Regulations are an extension of the Equality Act 2010 that all public bodies need to adhere to and apply to all of our local government organisations, including the smaller parish and town councils.

Here are some ways you can help to meet these requirements:

Do a full audit of your website, mobile app or system against the technical specifications in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

There are several ways you can do this

• use tools to conduct a basic accessibility check
• pay a third party to do a detailed audit for you

Publish an Accessibility Statement which explains what is and isn't accessible on your website and provide details of when you intend to fix it.

The government provide a website accessibility statement template to help you to do this.

Website monitoring

Free browser extensions can help you monitor your website and highlight any issues with the web page content, such as WAVE browser extension

There are tools or companies you can pay for that can monitor your website and help you address any issues you may have.

PDF alternatives

We are also working to reduce the number of PDFs and documents on our website.

If PDFs are not created with care, are complex or contain forms, they are often bad for accessibility, and rarely meet the legal accessibility standards now required of us on the web. We prefer to provide content produced as web pages (html).

These following document types are the most common PDFs previously created for our website and are better delivered as web pages instead.

• flyers and posters (we should not be using PDFs designed specifically for print as web content, an accompanying web page is best practice)
• how-to guides
• word document advice notes
• terms and conditions documents

Document accessibility

We now use SCULPT for Accessibility as a minimum standard for creating accessible documents.

We ask our third parties to also follow these SCULPT principles when creating documents or materials for us.