Accessibility Statement

Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulation

The website for the parish of Bridford, Devon is operated by the community on a voluntary basis with funding by Bridford Parish Council related to hosting the website in a data centre. The funding and use to publish Parish Council matter makes the website subject to the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulation (2018).

The Accessibility Regulation requires a notice providing details related to accessibility.

About the Website

The website is operated using the freely available WordPress software which is designed to aid a website achieve accessibility requirements. The webpages are generated using a theme (these provide webpage structure and add all the imagery and presentation) that is designed to aid a website support accessibility. In order to add capability to the website additional software has been added, such as classifieds and calendars. All of these aspects of the website are subject to on-going upgrade in order that the respective suppliers can fix issues and enhance the functionality.

The website is used by around 10 people per day.

Accessibility statement update 2026

In the light of the new WCAG 2.2 accessibility guidelines it was discussed by the Parish Council in July 2025 and agreed that it is still prohibitively expensive to a small Parish Council with a limited budget to provide a new website where the accessibility issues are only minor. In addition, the website is currently only used by around 11 people per day and the website content is not aimed specifically at an audience with a high proportion of people with disabilities. This situation will be kept under review.

In April and May 2026, further tests with Wave by Web AIM were carried out on the website to check that the pages were accessible. The results were 8.7 and 9.1/10. Any minor issues that were flagged were resolved. New Parish Council content is produced in line with the latest accessibility criteria as advised by the Government (link opens new page): https://www.gov.uk/guidance/publishing-accessible-documents The accessibility checker in Word is used when creating new Word documents for the website.

We will continue to test the website regularly and update the accessibility statement accordingly.

Accessibility Testing

During September 2020 a sample of pages were tested using the automated tool Deque AXE and manually tested for access via a keyboard and using Mac Voiceover. The website has over 9,000 pages although many of those are automatically generated and of the same structure with slightly different content. As they follow the same structure sampling is a mechanism to identify issues with the website design although can mean that individual pieces of content are not reviewed.

Any issues identified fall into three areas, these were then reviewed and as appropriate remediated:

  1. The underlying WordPress software, theme or additional software causes an issue. Where it is possible without changing the underlying software or themes these issues have been resolved.  Changing the software or theme is either technically not possible or will mean that future upgrades to the software cannot be taken without creating on-going change.
  2. The automated testing software was not able to determine whether an aspect of the website passes or fails. These have been manually reviewed and resolved where appropriate in line with point 1.
  3. The issue relates to the content previously published. Where possibly these have been resolved. Examples include adding electronic tags to images.

Known Accessibility Issues

  1. In a small number of cases the software or theme has generated poorly structured HTML which may affect the ability of individual accessibility software to correctly interact with the content.
    Issues in these cases will be subject to ongoing review as the software or theme is updated. When a visitor identifies an issue with specific accessibility software then please raise through the Parish Clerk and a specific investigation will be completed at the time.
    The Parish Council has also explored moving the website from community operated to commercial provision with an expectation that these issues could be reduced further. The cost and time to move to the commercial provision, compared to both the magnitude of the accessibility issue and the low daily visitor numbers at this time is considered a disproportionate burden. This will be kept under review.
  2. Historic content may have been written in a way that does not aid accessibility and/or includes images, scanned documents and/or photographs without a text description or equivalent. Historic content is often rarely accessed and as such will only be reviewed when an issue is raised to the Parish Clerk.

Alternative Access

Any parts of the website that relate to Parish Council matters can be made available in other formats by the Parish Clerk.

Reporting Accessibility Concerns

All concerns related to web accessibility should be drawn to the attention of the Parish Clerk.

Enforcement Procedure

If after first reporting accessibility concerns to the Parish Clerk there is an on-going issue that you do not feel is being addressed please contact the Equality Advisory Support Service.