Accessibility statement

Skills Connect: Accessibility Statement

Skills Connect: Accessibility Statement

We hope you find our website easy to use. We are committed to making it as accessible as possible.

This accessibility statement applies to the Skills Connect domain.

This website is run by the West of England Combined Authority. 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.

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

How accessible this website is

We know some parts of our main website and its associated domains are not fully accessible:

  • Some PDF documents are not fully accessible to screen reader software
  • The link purpose of all our hyperlinks may not be immediately clear from the text
  • Html heading tags may not be presented in a logical order on several pages
  • Alt-text may be included where images should be marked as decorative
  • When zoomed in to 400% the cookie banner which appears when first landing on our domains covers the entire viewport and is partially cut off
  • There may be some accessibility issues on forms we have created using Dotdigital and Lamplight. These issues include technical coding issues relating to ARIA text; confirmation page text not being correctly announced, and radio buttons not being associated with visual labels. We have requested the developers update the software.
  • Some videos may not have a transcript uploaded with them

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: comms@westofengland-ca.gov.uk
  • call: 0117 428 6210

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, contact: comms@westofengland-ca.gov.uk to speak with someone from our Communication and Marketing teams

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

If you would like to contact us by phone, please use the following number: 0117 428 6210

For further details on how to contact us, please use our contact page.

Technical information about this website’s accessibility 

The West of England Combined Authority 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

The West of England Combined Authority and its associated websites are partially compliant.

Our websites are 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:
  • Not all of our videos have an audio description for important information like actions, scene changes or on-screen text. This fails on WCAG 1.2.5 Audio Description (prerecorded). For new videos we create, we will either include audio descriptions natively, or create a separate file with audio descriptions.
  • The following issues are created by our use of Dotdigital which we are unable to amend internally. We have raised them with the third-party service provider who will look to amend them in future releases:
  • The radio buttons on the Newsletter Sign-up form are individually labelled but do not appear to be associated with their overall main visual label which in this case is the question that needs to be answered. This fails on WCAG 1.3.1 Info and relationships.
  • The form to apply for Future Bright requires personal information about the user but the inputs do not have autocomplete attributes. Similarly, there is an option to reveal more fields if you are not filling out the form for yourself. The inputs in ‘Referrer's details' also ask for personal information but do not have autocomplete attributes. This fails on WCAG 1.3.5 Identify input purpose.
  • The first four fields on the newsletter sign-up form asks for personal information about the user but do not have any autocomplete values set. This fails on WCAG 1.3.5 Identify input purpose.
  • There are several parsing issues in Dotdigital. This is where markup languages have been used incorrectly, such as HTML (HyperText Markup Language), meaning it may not work reliably across all supported browsers, devices and assistive technologies. This fails  WCAG 4.1.1 Parsing.
  • For the newsletter sign-up form, the drop down element that appears as part of the ‘Phone’ input to choose an area code there is an ARIA attribute which does not have a valid value: • aria-activedescendant="iti-0__item-gb-preferred”. This fails on WCAG 4.1.2 Name, role, value.
  • Error messages for the newsletter sign-up form appear after pressing ‘Submit’ when empty or invalid information has been entered into mandatory fields. After pressing ‘Submit’ the errors are 46 announced to users of assistive technology as expected. However, the status message in some cases changes when you edit the field, and these changes are not announced. For example, when submitting the form with an empty 'Email' field the error message reads 'Please answer the question below'. If this field is then edited but with an invalid email address the message changes to 'The format is incorrect' and that change in the status is not announced. This fails on WCAG 4.1.3 Status messages.
  • When the newsletter sign-up form is submitted the page content changes to say 'Thank you' and this status message is not announced to users of assistive technology. This fails on WCAG 4.1.3 Status messages.
Content that’s not within the scope of the accessibility regulations
  • In the cookies menu that can be expanded from the bottom left corner of all main pages there is a toggle switch for 'Analytical Cookies'. The text 'Off' does not have sufficient contrast against the background. This fails on WCAG 1.4.3 Contrast (Minimum). This has been raised as an issue with the providers who are looking to resolve it in a future release.
  • 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.  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.

What we’re doing to improve accessibility

We have developed an accessibility management plan which features the next steps in our efforts to improve our websites accessibility.

The immediate steps we are taking to improve accessibility are as follows:

  • Reviewing key documents (PDFS and Word docs) across our websites and improving their accessibility.
  • Reviewing alt-text of all images, ensuring decorative images are marked as such.
  • Ensuring all videos have transcripts attached.
  • Reviewing existing pages and make sure when creating new pages, logical sequential heading structure is used.
  • Ensuring link purpose is clear in all hyperlinks and buttons.
  • Adding language of page information when creating forms and pages in Dotdigital.

Following this we have set out a longer-term plan which sets out plans for further audits, internal training and other methods for improving the organisations accessibility standards.

Preparation of this accessibility statement

This statement was prepared on 22/08/23 internally. Accessibility compliance and quality assurance checks were made by the website development agency (JBI Digital) as part of their development process on this site, which was to meet WCAG 2.1 AA standards on launch. It was last reviewed and updated on 14/11/23 following an independent audit by Cabinet Office.