Accessibility

This statement was first published in January 2022 and updated in June 2023. 

Here at the London Borough of Harrow we use Silktide to scan our entire website on a weekly basis. Its tests our full directory of web pages against accessibility standards.

The following accessibility statement applies to the Harrow Council website. www.harrow.gov.uk

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’).

Compliance status

We continually aim to provide a website that follows the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1. Consequently our site is:

  • Partially compliant with A and AA standards, due to the non-compliances listed in the section below.
  • Not compliant with the AAA standard, due to the non-compliances listed in the section below.

This website is run by the digital team at Harrow Council. We want as many people as possible to be able to use this website. 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. This includes the most recent versions of JAWS, NVDA and VoiceOver.

We test our site with readability tools such as Silktide. This is to make the website content as simple as possible to understand.

Browser support

We support the following browsers:

  • IE7 and above
  • Recent versions of Mozilla Firefox
  • Google Chrome
  • iOS Safari
  • Android 2.3 and above

Site compatibility and screen readers

Our website is compatible with basic operating system screen magnifiers. It is also compatible with speech recognition software e.g. Dragon Naturally Speaking. Moreover the site is compatible with operating system speech packages including: 

  • Jaws
  • ZoomText
  • NVDA
  • VoiceOver
  • Window Eyes
  • Supernova screen readers
  • MAGic

Low accessibility areas of the website

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

Images without alt-text

Some images do not have a text alternative. Therefore people using a screen reader cannot access the information. This fails certain success criterion in WCAG 2.1. When we publish new content we’ll make sure our use of images meets accessibility standards.

Reporting maps

Some of our maps are hard to navigate for screen reader users. This fails certain success criterion in WCAG 2.1.

Colour contrasting

Some of our website element colours do not currently adhere to the colour standards. This fails certain success criterion in WCAG 2.1.

PDF readability

Some of our PDF content on the website is not fully readable. This makes it difficult to access information for screen readers users. This fails certain success criterion in WCAG 2.1.

We are actively optimising our non-readable PDFs; this is an ongoing project.

Contacting us or visiting us in person