Accessibility statement

This accessibility statement applies to the website www.healthinnowest.net.

This website is run by Health Innovation West of England. 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 tried to make the website text as simple as possible to understand.

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:

  • the slider on the home page can cause problems for screen readers, and so it has been hidden as the functionality is not essential for navigating the website
  • but if the zoom function is used, the spacing will adjust proportionately
  • most older PDF documents are not fully accessible to screen reader software
  • not all videos have captions.

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 as soon as possible.

Reporting accessibility problems with this website

We’re always looking to improve the accessibility of this website. If you find any problems not listed on this page or think we’re not meeting accessibility requirements, please contact us with the problems you’ve encountered:

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

Health Innovation West of England 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

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

Non-compliance with the accessibility regulations

  • Links that do not make sense when their link text is read in isolation. This fails WCAG 2.4.4 Link Purpose (In Context).

We are reviewing and fixing all of our button and signpost links so that they make sense when read in isolation, and will update this statement when this work is completed.

Some non-decorative images do not have a text alternative, so people using a screen reader cannot access the information. This fails WCAG 2.1 success criterion 1.1.1 (non-text content). We plan to add text alternatives for all non-decorative images by December 2021.

When we publish new or update existing content, we’ll make sure our use of images, headings and links meets accessibility standards.

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.

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

Third party content

We embed content on this website from Twitter, Vimeo and YouTube, as well as some third-party plugins. This is exempt from the accessibility regulations under regulation 4 2(e) as it is third-party content that is neither funded nor developed by, nor under the control of, the West of England AHSN.

Live video

We do not plan to add captions to live video streams because live video is exempt from meeting the accessibility regulations.

What we’re doing to improve accessibility

We carried out an accessibility audit of our website in January 2021 and refreshed the website in October 2021 to fix the majority of the issues we discovered.

This included improving colour contrast errors and empty heading tags, adding a label to the search form field, adding alternative text to linked images, and hiding the home page ‘slider’ from screen readers so that it doesn’t cause issues.

We will regularly review the website and continue to fix any accessibility issues that we identify. We encourage users who experience any problems to flag these with us direct so that we can resolve them. Our contact details are in the ‘reporting accessibility problems with this website’ section above.

Preparation of this accessibility statement

This statement was prepared on 26 October 2021. It will be reviewed in autumn 2023.

We used this approach to deciding on a sample of pages to test as part of our initial accessibility audit in January 2021: Gov.uk – doing a basic accessibility check.

This website was last tested on 1 November 2021, following the website refresh to fix identified issues. The test and refresh was carried out by We Are DNA Ltd

 

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Health Innovation West of England is part of the Royal United Hospitals Bath Foundation Trust. Health Innovation West of England is not responsible for the content of external sites. Read about our links to external sites.