Accessibility statement for North East Lincolnshire Data Observatory

This accessibility statement applies to http://www.nelincsdata.net/.

This website is run by North East Lincolnshire Council (NELC) and 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 made the website text as simple as possible to understand.

How accessible this website is

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

the text does not always reflow into a single column when you change the size of the browser window or zoom in
most older PDF documents are not fully accessible to screen reader software
some of our online forms are difficult to navigate using just a keyboard
many chart legends use colour alone to identify data values within the chart
some controls have no accessible name, such as the ‘info’ icon
the contrast of text is inadequate on some controls when the visual focus indicator is present
elements such as accordions fail to disclose whether they are expanded or collapsed, to assistive technologies

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:

Email: Digital-Inclusion@nelincs.gov.uk

Call: 01472 313131

Address: NE Lincs Council Municipal Offices, Town Hall Square, Grimsby, DN31 1HU

The Council will consider your request and get back to you in 5 working days.

Reporting accessibility problems with this site

The Council is always looking to improve the accessibility of this website. If you find any problems not listed on this page or think the Council is not meeting accessibility requirements, contact: Digital-Inclusion@nelincs.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 the Council responds to your complaint, contact the Equality Advisory and Support Service (EASS).

Contacting us by phone or visiting us in person

Council offices have audio induction loops and this facility is available at: North East Lincolnshire Council, Municipal Offices (the Municipal Offices are currently closed due to COVID-19 restrictions), Town Hall Square, Grimsby, North East Lincolnshire, DN31 1HU.

Find out how to contact us North East Lincs Council - Contact us.

Technical information about this website's accessibility

North East Lincolnshire 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 not compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1 AA standard. The non-compliances are listed below.

Non-accessible content

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

Non-compliance with the accessibility regulations

Some controls rely on icons to indicate they contain further information, such as the ‘info’ icon, which is a letter ‘i’ in a blue circle, these elements do not have an accessible name so would make it extremely difficult for users of screen readers or voice input to interact with them or understand their purpose – this fails Success Criterion 1.1.1 Non-text Content – Level A
Some of the page structure uses a header element more than once, without distinguishing the second usage by adding an accessible name this fails Success Criterion 1.3.1 Info and Relationships – Level A and Success Criterion 2.4.1 Bypass Blocks – Level A
Most of the charts and graphs have a legend that is reliant upon colour only to associate its properties to the values within the chart, this fails Success Criterion 1.4.1 Use of Color – Level A
When using just a keyboard a yellow visual focus indicator highlights which menu item has focus and the text within remains white, this contrast is insufficient and this fails Success Criterion 1.4.3 Contrast (Minimum) – Level AA
The site becomes difficult to use when resizing the browser, as some content in the menus becomes cropped, information in tables becomes obscured and some controls such as the print icon overlap text, this fails Success Criterion 1.4.10 Reflow – Level AA
The visual focus indicator uses a yellow background, oftentimes against a white or light grey background and this does not have a contrast ratio of at least 3:1, this fails Success Criterion 1.4.11 Non-text Contrast – Level AA
The menu opens up a flyout menu on keyboard focus and hover, this cannot be dismissed with the esc key, this fails Success Criterion 1.4.13 Content on Hover or Focus – Level AA
The maps have controls to zoom in on to a ward, these controls cannot be accessed via keyboard only, this fails Success Criterion 2.1.1 Keyboard – Level A
Page titles in the reports menu do not change when navigating to a sub-page and therefore do not offer specific enough information about the title of the page, this fails Success Criterion 2.4.2 Page Titled – Level A
The summary charts on the home page are left-aligned and their respective summary text is right aligned, when navigating with cursor keys this order is reversed, so the focus order neither matches the visual order or the DOM order, this fails Success Criterion 2.4.3 Focus Order – Level A
Multiple links have an identical name or links that point to the same resource have differing link text, this fails Success Criterion 2.4.4 Link Purpose (In Context) – Level A
Multiple controls do not have visible labels and their purpose is not always clear, this fails Success Criterion 2.4.6 Headings and Labels – Level AA
Links that point to the same resource on the Data Explorer page are not consistently identifies, an example of which is the ‘Females age group 0 – 15’ can be navigated to by clicking the link text and both the right-facing arrow and the ‘info’ icon, both of which have the title ‘view info’ which does not match that of the link text, this fails Success Criterion 3.2.4 Consistent Identification – Level AA
There are multiple HTML validation issues where the attribute ‘arial-label’ has been applied to links on the Data pages, which is a typo, these fail Success Criterion 4.1.1 Parsing – Level A
The accordions on the report pages do communicate their expanded/collapsed states to assistive technologies, this fails Success Criterion 4.1.2 Name, Role, Value – Level A

Disproportionate burden

North East Lincolnshire Council are committed to meeting the needs of users across all of our websites and therefore do not claim this to be burdensome.

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. For example, we do not plan to fix Strong Economy.

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

What we're doing to improve accessibility

Our accessibility roadmap summarises how and when we plan to improve accessibility on this website.

This website is a replacement site for the previous NELDO site and the project initiation was prior to the accessibility regulations coming into effect. This has resulted in this new site being non-conformant with the accessibility regulations and this is something that the council and our supplier are both committed to putting right.

We have performed an interim test of the website’s accessibility using manual and automated techniques, we identified a significant number of issues, which were then passed on to our supplier. Our supplier fixed some of the issues and is committed to working with us to resolve the remaining issues.

Our commitment to you, is that we will continue to work with our supplier to provide the necessary test results and report issues where identified, so our supplier can add these to their project’s issue tracking.

Our supplier is presently working through the fixes and will update us accordingly.

Our supplier has committed to implementing a new maps and charting module, which will increase the overall accessibility and as this is the most complex piece of work, this is what we anticipate taking the longest. Our supplier has committed to fixing this by the end of July 2021 and we will provide support in their testing and Beta programs to ensure the accessibility of the product meets the needs of users.

Preparation of this accessibility statement

This statement was prepared on 1 March 2021. It was last reviewed on 1 March 2021.

This website was last tested on 11 February 2021. The test was carried out by a member of North East Lincolnshire Council's Web Team.

We used this approach when deciding on a sample of pages to test:

Core pages such as:

The testing of these pages included all states (all disclosure elements expanded and collapsed etc) and a view (data tables and their associated charts/graphs etc).