Accessibility Statement

This website is run by Essex County Council. We want as many people as possible to be able to use this website.

• We have endeavoured to provide text alternatives for non-text content, this includes extensive use of alt and aria tags, ensuring form controls are labelled and where data is presented in a pie chart (What employees in a particular career studied in Higher Education) we have included the underlying data in table for screen readers.
• The content of our pages is marked up appropriately including headings, article tags and main tags.
• Default foreground and background colours provide sufficient contrast.
• We have endeavoured to facilitate navigation by keyboard, ensuring the tab order is appropriate and visible focus is shown.
• We have provided 'skip to content' markers to enable users to bypass repeated content on pages.
• The site is responsive and this includes zooming.
• We’ve also made the website text as simple as possible to understand, although some pages may include industry-specific words, acronyms or phrases which some users may not be familiar with. We have made efforts to provide explanations of terms and concepts where practical.
• We do not have any inaccessible PDFs or Word documents which are essential to providing our services.

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

 

How accessible this website is

 

• the carousel banner cannot be paused
• some older PDF documents may not be fully accessible to screen reader software
• some videos may not have complete captions
• some images may not have complete alternative text
• some links may not have a completely clear purpose

 

What to do if you cannot access parts of this website

 

If you need information on this website in a different format like accessible PDF, large print, easy read, audio recording or braille please contact us by email ([email protected]). We’ll consider your request and get back to you.

 

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 email us ([email protected] and copy in our technology partners PDMS Ltd ([email protected]).

 

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

 

Non accessible content

Non compliance with the accessibility regulations

 

Some images may not have a text alternative or the text alternative is not appropriate, so people using a screen reader cannot access the information. This fails WCAG 2.1 success criteria 1.1.1 (non-text content). As content is constantly being added and amended this will require ongoing diligence by the content administrators, to ensure use of images meet accessibility standards.

Link text

Some links within the site and to external resources may not meet the criteria 2.4.4 (Link Purpose).  As content is constantly being added and amended this will require ongoing diligence by the content administrators, to ensure links meet accessibility standards.

Carousel content

Some pages contain a 'carousel' component which cannot be paused. This fails to meet criteria 2.2 (Enough Time). A fix for this is in progress and this will be reviewed by 1st Sept 2021.

 

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

 

PDFs and other documents

Some older PDFs and Word documents do not meet accessibility standards - for example, they may not be structured so they’re accessible to a screen reader. This does not meet WCAG 2.1 success criterion 4.1.2 (name, role value).

We do not have any inaccessible PDFs or Word documents which are essential to providing our services.

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.  Where we do not have the rights to the content of the PDF or document produced by a third-party we will not be able to change or replace it.

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

Videos

Pages that contain embedded videos make use of HTML iframe elements. These do not currently contain name or role information in ARIA, title or label attributes. This fails to meet criteria 1.2 (Name, Role, Value).  Videos are inserted using a third-party CMS and the embed code is provided by YouTube via oEmbed.  We do not have the ability to add ARIA, title or label attributes to the iframe.  This is excluded from the scope of the accessibility regulations as third-party content over which we do not have control.  This will be next reviewed by 31st December 2020.

Some embedded videos have not been commissioned by us but been produced and made available for embedding by third-parties. Therefore we do not have control over their captioning, we endeavour to only embed videos with captions but it may be necessary to embed videos without captions if no alternative is available.  If there are any videos without captions this would not meet the criteria under section 1.2.1 (Audio-only and Video-only (Prerecorded)).  There are not presently any videos embedded in this site which do not have captions.

Opportunity Details

As the opportunities are input by third-parties, they may have not provided ideal descriptions and the system automatically uses parts of this content to produce page titles and links.  This may therefore not meet the criterion required by section 2.4.4 (Link Purpose) or section 2.4.2 (Page Titled).  This is excluded from the scope of the accessibility regulations as third-party content over which we do not have control.

Unpredictable Number of Opportunities Returned

The opportunities feature of the site searches third party datasets.  As not all the opportunities in the returned dataset may meet the search criteria or being in our region, not all are shown the user - this means it is not possible to advise the user in advance the number of opportunities that will be shown when they click 'Load More' and it may be that an inconsistent number of opportunities are returned each time.  This may not meet criterion 3.2 (Predictability).  This is excluded from the scope of the accessibility regulations as third-party content over which we do not have control.

 

How we tested this website

 

This website was last tested on 13th February 2020. The test was carried out by PDMS Ltd.

We used this approach of focusing on the key content areas of the website.

This included the homepage, opportunities searching and opportunities, career profiles, provider information, employer pages, news and a selection of web content from other sections of the website.

We used a combination of the following tools and techniques to test:

• SiteImprove
• WAVE
• AXE
• Manual testing

 

What we’re doing to improve accessibility