Council Tax and business rates phone lines

The telephone service for Council Tax and business rates will be unavailable on Friday 4 October. You can still contact us online to tell us of any changes in circumstances, make a payment arrangement or make a payment. Our telephone service will resume on Monday 7 October.

Accessibility statement - Derby City Council website

This accessibility statement applies to the Derby City Council website, www.derby.gov.uk.

This website is run by Derby City Council. 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 using ReachDeck
zoom in up to 300% without the text spilling off the screen
navigate most of the website using just a keyboard
listen to most of the website using a screen reader (either ReachDeck as provided on every page, or the most recent versions of JAWS, NVDA and VoiceOver)

We are working 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 is this website?

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

you cannot modify the line height or spacing of text
most older documents (such as PDF and Microsoft Word documents) are not fully accessible to screen reader software
many links do not describe their purpose
some in page buttons do not announce their function to screen reader software
the responsive menu once opened sets focus to after the menu items, requiring backwards navigation on screen reader software
some video content does not have captions
some of our online forms are difficult to navigate using assistive technology

The what we're doing to improve accessibility section details how we plan to resolve the above issues.

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 let us know through our website feedback form.

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).

Contacting us by phone or visiting us in person

We are signed up to the Deaf and Hearing Impaired People’s Commitment.

We can arrange a British Sign Language (BSL) interpreter on request and we also use Sign Video so you can call us. Some key services are accessible by mobile phone so Deaf people can text us and also by Relay UK.

We have hearing loops in our meeting rooms, in reception and our café area. We also have visible emergency alarms.

Find out how to contact us on our contact the council page.

Technical information about this website’s accessibility

Derby City 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 partially compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1 AA standard.

Non-compliance with the accessibility regulations

We have recently launched a new website with wide-ranging accessibility improvements and will shortly be auditing this to highlight any non-compliance with the accessibility regulations.

Disproportionate burden

Old PDFs and other documents

PDF and Word documents produced before September 2020 may not be accessible. We have assessed the cost of re-authoring all such content and believe that doing so now would be a disproportionate burden within the meaning of the accessibility regulations. We aim to reassess the viability of re-authoring all such documents once we have fully audited the accessibility of all of our websites and their content.

Video captions and media alternative

Videos published before September 2020 may not be provided with captions and media alternatives (text-based description of video). We have assessed the cost of updating all such videos and believe that doing so now would be a disproportionate burden within the meaning of the accessibility regulations. We are working on implementing a new video captioning tool for new videos, and will revisit the possibility of updating previous videos once we have fully audited the accessibility of all of our websites and their content.

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

PDFs and other documents

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 ensure any such documents created after September 2020 are accessible by design, or provided as HTML.

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 PDFs that could be republished as HTML, as in these examples we will in the future work to convert them to HTML pages of the website.

Any new PDFs or Word documents we publish will meet accessibility standards, unless they are provided by a third party, where an accessible version is not available.

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 are committed to providing the most accessible experience possible through our websites and we care deeply about achieving this. We are working hard to audit accessibility of all of our websites and will publish a roadmap as soon as we have fully audited our online estate.

Preparation of this accessibility statement

This statement was prepared on 17 September 2020. It was last reviewed on 17 January 2022.

This website was last tested on 3 September 2020. The test was carried out internally by the Derby City Council web team, using a combination of manual testing and semi-automated testing software, including:

Siteimprove
WAVE
HTML_CodeSniffer
axe

To decide upon a sample of pages to test for this accessibility statement we considered analytics data around the most popular pages, in addition to choosing pages to represent each main section of the website, and each of the main content templates.