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Accessibility Statement

Accessibility statement for www.scwonline.wales

This website is run by Social Care Wales. 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 are also working to make the website test 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 this website are not fully accessible.

Screen reader users would find this website difficult to use because:

  • information in tables accurately due to embedded code.
  • some page items are readable due to missing text and descriptive text
  • fieldsets and heading are used incorrectly making it hard for screen readers to follow.
  • users are not advised on updates of on-screen content and were often unaware of such things: These mainly included status updates (like “Your application has been cancelled”) and search filter updates, but also includes “expanding content” on sections of the page that opened when clicked.
  • a flowchart is used to depict information direction, but the alternative text for this is inadequate, and did not give the same experience.

Keyboard users would also find this website difficult to use because:

  • highlight (the highlighting that shows a keyboard user what they can interact with) would often not be enabled on items on the screen, or the focus would move onto invisible items
  • on many pages it was found that there was not a “Skip to content” link as the first interactive element, if any were found at all. Keyboard users utilise this link to bypass navigation and jump straight to the content.

Voice Activation users using Dragon Naturally Speaking would find this website difficult to use because:

  • some items are not programmed accurately so users might not be able to determine how to use them or know which commands to use; and some items do not activate when Dragon’s ‘dictation mode’ was used.
  • the size of some items are too small to click on if the user has issues with fine motor control.

Low Vision users will find this website difficult to use because:

  • the colour contrast used
  • issues when zooming/magnifying the page
  • status messages disappear too quickly to read.

Cognitively different users will find using this website difficult to use because:

Instructions could not be followed because the instructions are incorrect

include incorrect grammar, meaning some paragraphs do not make grammatical sense;

the inability to remove documents from the system if they were uploaded in error;

page refreshes that do not display changes to data that were implemented.

The timeout feature does not warn users that they would be logged out, if a page was not updated quickly enough.

Additional issues users may experience include:

  • the ‘Date Picker’ or calendar widget does not work very well with most assistive technology
  • you cannot modify the line height or spacing of text
  • most older PDF documents are not fully accessible to screen reader software
  • you can only use the latest version of Google Chrome or another up to date browser i.e. Edge. For more information on this topic visit the help page

What to do if you cannot access parts of this website

If you need information on this website in a different format like accessible PDF, large print, easy read, audio recording or braille:

  • email enquiries@socialcare.wales
  • call 0300 30 33 444

We’ll consider your request and get back to you in seven days.

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: info@socialcare.wales

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

Visit our contact us page.

Technical information about this website’s accessibility

Social Care Wales 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 not compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1 AA standard, due to the non-compliances listed below.

Non accessible content

Technical errors on several pages of the website

There are a number of technical errors on our website that make some parts of our content non accessible. We have listed below the non-accessible parts and the following reasons.

Elements with the aria-hidden attribute set to true cannot be seen by screen reading software if navigated to in context by users; but if the tab key is used to navigate instead these elements may be accessed, giving screen reader users two different versions of the page.

  • The aria-label given to many of the elements is not descriptive, seems superfluous and could confuse screen reader users.
  • The use of the WAI-ARIA attribute ‘role’ has been implemented incorrectly and could cause confusing to screen reader users.
  • Lists were marked up incorrectly: List items should never be direct children of anything other than lists and non-list item should never be direct children of lists but contained inside a list item.
  • Duplicate ID values were found. More than one element with the same id attribute value can cause spurious results. Every id attribute must be unique for the Assistive Technology to interact properly.

Pseudo elements were not marked up correctly to allow keyboard and screen readers users to interact with the element correctly (if at all).

Technical issues on our website

There are a number of technical errors on our website that make some parts of our content non accessible.

We plan to fix all technical issues listed by December 2021.

Disproportionate burden

We have not identified any items that might be considered a disproportionate burden.  We are currently working with suppliers on the errors identified.

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

PDFs and other documents

Many of our older PDFs and Word documents do not meet accessibility standards - for example, they may not be structured so they’re accessible to a screen reader. This does not meet WCAG 2.1 success criterion 4.1.2 (name, role value).

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

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.

How we tested this website

This website was last tested on 29 June 2020. The test was carried out by the Digital Accessibility Centre.

We tested:

You can read the full accessibility test report

What we’re doing to improve accessibility

Our accessibility roadmap will be published on this site in January 2021 and shows how and when we plan to improve accessibility on this website.

This statement was prepared on 18/09/2020 It was last updated on 18/09/2020