Goring-on-Thames Parish Council is committed to providing a fully accessible website experience for all users of all abilities, including those who rely on assistive technologies like screen readers, screen enlargement software, and alternative keyboard input devices to navigate the web.

Ongoing Efforts to Ensure Accessibility

We follow the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) version 2.1 as our guiding principle for determining accessibility. These are internationally agreed-upon standards that cover a wide range of recommendations and best practices for making content useable. As we add new pages and functionality to our website, all designs, code, and content entry practices are checked against these standards.

Website accessibility is an ongoing process. We continually test content and features for WCAG 2.1 Level AA compliance and remediate any issues to ensure we meet or exceed the standards. Testing of our website is performed by our team members using industry-standard tools such as the Accessibility Checker WordPress Plugin, color contrast analyzers, keyboard-only navigation techniques, and Flesch-Kincaid readability tests.

Accessibility Features On Our Website

The following is a list of items we included in our website to improve its accessibility:

• We changed to a WordPress theme that well reviewed for accessibility
• We checked site accessibility using the WAVE evaluation tool and followed its recommendations to the extent our control allowed.

Where We’re Improving

In our efforts to bring our website up to standard, we are targeting the following areas:

• Header on all pages is not <h1>
• Labelling of email signup forms
• Some historic pdfs contain images of text (eg minute or reports) rather than machine readable text. When we identify such a pdf we try to replace it with an accessibility compliant one, but due to the age of some of these items it is not always possible to recreate the pdf from source.

This is part of our broader effort to make everyone’s experience at Goring-on-Thames Parish Council’s website a welcoming and enjoyable one. Please note that while we make every effort to provide information accessible for all users, we cannot guarantee the accessibility of third party websites to which we may link.

Accessibility Support Contact

We welcome comments, questions, and feedback on our website. If you are using assistive technologies and are having difficulty using our website, please email j.emerson@goringparishcouncil.gov.uk and let him know the nature of the problem. We will do our best to assist you and resolve issues.