Accessibility statement

This accessibility statement applies to https://www.shsc.nhs.uk

This website is run by Sheffield Health and Social Care NHS Foundation Trust.

We want to make sure as many people as possible can use this website to find out about the support we provide. This accessibility statement tells you:

  • How Accessible this website is.
  • How you can get in touch about an accessibility issues
  • How we are improving accessibility on our website.

How we’ve tried to make our website accessible for everyone

Our website uses Recite Me, this provides tools to help you view and access information on our website. You can use Recite Me by clicking on ‘accessibility tools and translation’ at the top of every page.

Recite Me provides accessibility through the ability to:

  • Increase or decrease the font size by zooming in up to 300% without the text spilling off the screen
  • Change the background colours to improve contrast
  • Speak the words on the page out loud for you in a range of languages
  • Translate the text on pages and in documents into a range of languages
  • Apply a screen to text to help you focus on certain paragraphs
  • A built-in dictionary to check any words you are unfamiliar with
  • Navigate most our site using speech recognition software
  • Navigate most of our site using just a keyboard
  • Listen to most of our website being read out loud (including the most recent versions of JAWS, NVDA and VoiceOver)

All of these settings are adjustable and you can save them for the next time you visit our site. You can also reset these options back to the original settings should you wish.

AbilityNet has advice on making your device easier to use if you have a disability, for example:

Supported browsers

Our website supports a range of the most popular web browsers. If you are using an older browser, particularly older versions of Internet Explorer, we may not be able to give you a full visual experience.

What we’re doing to improve accessibility

We are working to improve the accessibility of our website. We are working with staff to carry out training and implement processes to ensure that documents we produce are easier to navigate.

Information that may not be fully accessible

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

  • Some of our videos do not have captions. If you would like a transcript of the audio from any of our videos please get in touch. Most of our videos are listed on YouTube and you can turn out automatically generated captions on these videos. Please not these captions may not be completely accurate.
  • Most of the PDF documents on our website are not accessible on screen reader software. We are working to update our PDF documents to make them accessible PDFs on an ongoing basis. If you come across a PDF document that you would like to view but that has not been made accessible yet, please contact us and we will provide an accessible version.

Feedback and contact information

If you need information on this website in a different document format so you can access it electronically please contact engage@shsc.nhs.uk

If you use our services or you have been referred to our services you can have your need for accessible information recorded. We are able to provide a range of information and communication support. If this has not already happened or you do not currently use our services but require information in a different format then please email engage@shsc.nhs.uk and someone will contact you to discuss this.

Reporting accessibility problems with this website

We want to make sure this website is accessible for everyone. If you come across any problems that we’ve not explained on this page or think we could do more to meet your accessibility needs please email communications@shsc.nhs.uk and we’ll do our best to help.

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).

Technical information about this website’s accessibility

We are committed to making our 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. We are continuing our work to ensure we meet these standards and will regularly review our progress.

Non accessible content

The content listed below is non-accessible for the following reasons.

Non compliance with the accessibility regulations

Documents on the website

  • Most of our PDF or Word documents are not currently accessible to screen reader software – we are working to address this and hope to have this resolved by Spring 2021. As a result our website currently fails WCAG 2.1 success criterion 1.3.1 (information and relationships).
  • Most of our PDF or Word documents contain missing or blank ALT descriptive tags. In line with the issue above, we will be updating these documents as quickly as we can and hope to complete this work by Spring 2021. This currently fails WCAG 2.1 success criterion 1.1.1 (Non-text content)

Documents produced by other organisations

Some of our forms and guideline documents are produced by UK or EU partners. We will update these documents as accessible versions become available from partners. These documents currently fail WCAG 2.1 success criterion 1.3.1 (information and relationships).

Pre-recorded media

Some of our video content does not have captions or subtitles. We will be adding captions to all videos on the site that we own. Our video content currently fails WCAG 2.1 success criterion 1.2.2 (Pre-recorded).

Disproportionate burden

Having carried out a detailed check of all uploaded PDF files to this site we have assessed it would be a disproportionate burden to fix all of the documents published on www.shsc.nhs.uk since 23 September 2018, by 23 September 2020. The low numbers of views on these documents does not justify the cost of time, effort and resource to replace them. We are assessing which of these documents we can update as a priority and hope to have this resolved by the end of 2021.

We will ensure that wherever possible all new documents published on the website after 23 September 2020 are accessible, however, if you require help accessing information in any documents published prior to this date please email engage@shsc.nhs.uk

Content that is not within the scope of the accessibility regulations

PDFs and other documents

Many of our older PDF documents produced before 23 September 2018 do not meet accessibility standards. For example, they may not be accessible on a screen reader. 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.

For example, we do not plan to update our Board papers published before this date. Any new PDFs or Word documents we publish for guidance and reports will meet accessibility standards.

Live videos

We do not plan to add captions to live videos because live video is exempt from meeting the accessibility regulations.

Preparation of this accessibility statement

This statement was first prepared in January 2020. It was last updated on 04 December 2020.

This website (www.shsc.nhs.uk) was last tested on 24 November 2020. The test was carried out by the Trust’s Communications Team using Google Lighthouse, and validated using WAVE.

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