We aim to make this website accessible to all. We try to ensure all pages conform to WCAG 2.1 Level AA in line with the EU Accessibility Directive. Our accessibility statement below sets out this commitment and what we are doing to improve.

This website is run by Services For Education on behalf of Birmingham City Council. There should be no barriers for anyone who wants to use this website.

For example, you should be able to:

• change colours, contrast levels and fonts
• zoom in without the text spilling off the screen
• navigate most of the website using just a keyboard (including skip to content)
• navigate most of the website using speech recognition software
• listen to most of the website using a screen reader
• easily understand any content

Accessibility features

AbilityNet provides guidance about how to:

• make your mouse easier to use
• use your keyboard instead of a mouse
• talk to your device
• make your device talk to you
• make text larger
• change your colours
• magnify the screen

Change visibility settings with Accessibility Helper

You can change font size, change contrast colours and invert colours using the Accessibility helper tool.

Follow these steps:

1. To activate Accessibility Helper, click on the widget at the bottom right of any page

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1. This will open a menu on the right-hand side of the page displaying different options.

   

2. You can change the options by click on any of the menu options

Our website

This is the main Local Offer Birmingham website.

Our online forms system and ecommerce system is hosted within the main website.

How accessible this website is

We know some parts of this website aren’t fully accessible.

For example:

• some older Word and PDF documents aren’t fully accessible for people using screen readers
• some of our Products may contain images that contain text, we are working to rectify this.

There are some issues we are aware of that are difficult to fix because of how our content management system works:

• some HTML pages are styled using inline styles rather than external stylesheets – this means any custom stylesheets you set up may not work on some of our pages

Auditing

We carry out regular accessibility audits of the website and a full website audit on an annual basis using WCAG 2.1 AA standards which guide our long term audit and improvement plans.

We use Silktide Web Accessibility Tools (a website quality assurance tool https://silktide.com/solutions/accessibility/) to scan our website every day and it keeps us updated about any changes in accessibility and quality assurance. We actively check these reports and make changes as necessary.

In addition to this, we carry out ad-hoc testing of pages and the site as a whole using third party testing tools. The majority of this testing is completed with the assistance of Siltide.

Let us know if you can’t access parts of this website

We’re always looking to improve the accessibility of this website. If you find any problems that aren’t listed on this page, please email support@servicesforeducation.co.uk

Enforcement procedure

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) is responsible for enforcing 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

The Local offer Birmingham is 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.

Issues with PDFs and other documents

Many of our older PDFs and Word documents don’t meet accessibility standards – for example, they may not be marked up so they’re accessible to a screen reader.

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. By September 2020, we plan to either fix these or replace them with accessible HTML pages.

The accessibility regulations don’t require us to fix PDFs or other documents published before 23 September 2018 if they’re not essential to providing our services. For more information about the accessibility regulations visit the Legislation.gov.uk website.

Issues with images, video and audio

Some of our images have missing or incorrect labels. We are working to correct this as an ongoing task.

What we’re doing to improve accessibility

We continuously improve our website’s accessibility. We hold regular website group meetings to measure our progress.

We are speaking to our third-party suppliers about improving the accessibility of their products.

This statement was prepared on 01 March 2021.