Accessibility Statement

The Mast Health Partnership is committed to providing a website that is accessible to the widest possible audience, regardless of technology or ability. We are actively working to increase the accessibility and usability of our website and in doing so adhere to many of the available standards and guidelines.

This website endeavours to conform to World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1 AA standard. These guidelines explain how to make web content more accessible for people with disabilities. Conformance with these guidelines will help make the web more user friendly for all people.

This site has been built using code compliant with W3C standards for HTML and CSS. The site displays correctly in current browsers and using standards compliant HTML/CSS code means any future browsers will also display it correctly.

Whilst The Mast Health Partnership strives to adhere to the accepted guidelines and standards for accessibility and usability, it is not always possible to do so in all areas of the website.

How accessible this website is

The majority of this website is fully accessible, and we run regular audits to identify any new problems.

We know that some parts of the website aren’t fully accessible:

  • we have a number of old publication documents which are in PDF format, and haven’t been designed for accessibility.
  • some content is embedded in our website, such as maps and videos, and you cannot easily scale these on screen (but you can open a full screen version).
  • some embedded videos from 3rd party providers do not have captions.

What to do if you cannot access parts of this website

If you need information on this website in a different format please contact us . We’ll consider your request and get back to you in 30 working days.

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 our practice manager.

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

We are committed to making its website accessible, in accordance with the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018. 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

Some 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 images. When we publish new content we’ll make sure our use of images meets accessibility standards.

Disproportionate burden – Interactive tools and transactions

Some of our interactive forms are difficult to navigate using a keyboard. For example, because some form controls are missing a ‘label’ tag. We’ve assessed the cost of fixing the issues with navigation and accessing information, and with interactive tools and transactions. We believe that doing so now would be a disproportionate burden within the meaning of the accessibility regulations. We will make another assessment when the website is next updated.

CONTENT OUTSIDE THE SCOPE OF THE REGULATIONS:

PDFs and other documents

Many of our 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

Some of our PDFs and Word documents are essential to providing our services. For example, we have PDFs with information on how users can access our services, and forms published as Word documents. We plan to either fix these or replace them with accessible HTML pages.

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.

Live video

Live video streams do not have captions. This fails WCAG 2.1 success criterion 1.2.4 (captions – live). We do not plan to add captions to live video streams because live video is exempt from meeting the accessibility regulations.

How we tested this website

This website was last tested in September 2020 using the WAV (Web Accessibility Tool) , the Tingtun Web Accessibility Checker and the Accessibility Insights for Web Google Chrome browser extension.

We tested every page of our site that was online and available to the public at this date.

This statement was prepared in March 2022

ACCESSIBILITY RESOURCES

We recognise that many people with accessibility issues will use their own software and browser extensions to make websites more accessible. We have however, as well as meeting as many accessibility guidelines as we can without creating a disproportionate burden to the practice also made the Equal Web Digital Accesibility tool available on our website (available from the wheelcair user icon torwards the bottom left of all the pages of our site)

There are a further wide range of resources and support available which you may wish to consider including: