Goudhurst ParishCouncil

Compliance with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

Version 1.0

21^st October 2025

 

Summary

We are reviewing our website –Goudhurst-pc.gov.uk– against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) because its overall compliance will form part of our Annual Governance and Accountability Return (AGAR) in 2026.

Our website in its current form does not fully meet the requirements of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). The areas of non-compliance relate to the use of assistive technology – where a browser reads the website aloud for users who may have a visual impairment.

There are some small technical issues with the site which will be easily resolved however the PDF content we load may not meet the required standard.

This document describes the issues and management strategies to ensure our site meets the standard and will pass our AGAR in 2026.

This document recommends:

1.Development of a process for managing existing and new content on our website.

2.The setting a retention policy for website content

3.Removal of content outside of the new policy

4.Resolution of accessibility issues with our website structure

5.Develop and implement a plan to ensure future content is compliant

6.Develop and implement a plan for content remediation 

7.Consider the need for a compliance tool.

8.Determine the level of AGAR audit activity

 

The purpose of our website

The website allows the parish council website to fulfil  its legal obligations around communication and transparency while also serving as a vital resource for engaging with the local community. The site ensures residents can easily access important information about our governance, decisions, and services. 

Legal and administrative requirements

Parish council websites must publish key information to comply with regulations, including the Transparency Code and accessibility standards. This includes: 

·Meeting records: Agendas, minutes, and supporting papers for all formal council meetings must be published. Agendas are required three days in advance, while minutes and reports must be posted within a month of the meeting.

·Financial documents: Councils must make end-of-year accounts, annual governance statements, and internal audit reports available online.

·Councillor information: The site must provide a list of all council members, their contact details, and declarations of interest.

·Statutory policies: Key documents like the code of conduct, financial regulations, and data protection policies must be available for public viewing.

·Accessibility: Websites must be designed to comply with WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility standards. This ensures the site is usable by people with disabilities, and an accessibility statement must be published.

·Asset register: A list of public land and buildings owned by the council must be accessible.

Community engagement and communication: Beyond statutory duties, a website helps a parish council connect with and serve its residents as a source of information.

Our Website Structure

The site has a core structure which changes infrequently. This structure supports the addition new information via email which means, in general, there is no need for day-to-day management or intervention by our office team.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)

The purpose of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is to make web content accessible to all people, including those with disabilities, by providing a set of internationally recognized recommendations. These guidelines ensure digital content is perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust, and they are used worldwide to measure compliance with accessibility legislation.

There are three levels of compliance – A, AA and AAA. We are required to be compliant with the AA requirements. See the Quick Reference section W3.org.

Compliance is required on all delivery channels – desktop, tablet and mobile. The key purpose of WCAG is to ensure:

·Inclusivity: WCAG provides the technical and design requirements needed to make digital services accessible to a wider range of users, regardless of their impairments. 

·Legal compliance: Following WCAG, specifically Level AA, means we comply with the Public Sector Bodies Accessibilities Regulations 2018. 

·Universal standard: The guidelines serve as the international standard for web accessibility, creating a consistent set of criteria for developers and designers to follow. 

·User assistance: By following WCAG, developers can create websites and apps that are easier to navigate for people with a variety of disabilities, including vision, hearing, mobility, and cognitive impairments. 

·Improved user experience: Conforming to WCAG can lead to a better user experience for everyone by improving things like navigation, clarity of information, and compatibility across different technologies and devices.

Managing Compliance

There are two areas of compliance that we need to manage:

1.WCAG Compliance of the website core structure with all requirements

2.WCAG Compliance of information/data components (agenda, minutes etc.) with the site

This report identifies strategies to manage both of these elements. In terms of a quantum the core site has a number of small issues (listed) which can be easily remediated however, the content we load onto the site (agenda, minutes etc.) represents a larger piece of work.

Managing the Core Structure

The core structure of the site changes infrequently and in day-to-day operation requires no maintenance. The site uses an accessibility compliance product – Userway  – which allows visitors to manage how the site is presented to meet their personal needs.  This is seen on the site as a blue circle with a white stickman image. Userway is a free tool and addresses a the larger percentage of WCAG compliance.

Ensuring the compliance of content

In our day-to-day management  we load images and PDF documents to the site via email for broader distribution. 

Images should all be tagged with a description of the image and its purpose. These are the attributes read aloud by assistive technologies. The images used on the core site have these descriptions but many others do not. These are limited in number and can easily remediated. A process can be put in place to manage future uploads.

The major compliance issue centres around the loading of PDF documents we use to notify meeting dates, meeting minutes etc. These are in general non-compliant. The impact here is that documents, when read-aloud, are delivered in a random order. A common issue is that a list of numbered bullet points are read as a column (i.e. 1, 2 3, 4, 4.1, 4.2)  rather than relating the numbers with their detail i.e. 1. To receive apologies…….

The options to manage these documents are discussed below. 

Managing Future Compliance

Future compliance can be managed in three ways:

1.Compliance checking of all content before being loaded onto the site

2.Quality Assurance check of changes to the core structure of the website when they are made

3.Consider the extended use of Userway (or another tool all of which will cost around £400 per annum) to provide a regular compliance reports. 

Managing historical Compliance

Before we begin any remediation we need to set the scope of our remediation exercise. We can reduce our scope by:

• Removing unwanted pages for example advertising historic parish activities 
• Removing pages containing historical information documents: For example those related to the neighbourhood plan other than the approved plan itself.
• Set timelines to remove pages older than a defined time frame based on our statutory needs and aligned with our GDPR requirements
• For complex pages containing PDF consider creating pages on the site rather than simply adding a PDF

·Where there are pages that we want to retain but either cannot update, or they are too complex, to update we can employ a user warning:  This file may not be suitable for users of assistive technology on relevant pages. If these pages are limited in their scope this is a valid approach to historical data. An example would be the Village Study

·Delete all pages that are no longer referenced

·Delete media that is no longer directly referenced on the site

In terms of scale we have 448 posts of which 255 are from 2024 and 80 are from 2025.

Managing Existing Pages

Remediating these is a large task. The strategies above will reduce the overall workload but remediation will involve either:

1.Editing the page and adding the PDF content as text

2.Adding a disclaimer around the accessibility of specific individual documents

3.Replacing the content with an accessible version of the document

Managing Future Content

Creating pages outside of WordPress

These pages will be created in a tool for example Word where the compliance can be checked before any publication. Documents and document templates used regularly should be checked for compliance. These will typically be meeting minutes or policy documents. 

PDF documents created elsewhere (Business Intelligence is the biggest source here) are not compliant and will need to be checked using the tools in Adobe to manage non-compliance of PDF documents before loading. This will need to be tested to understand the scale or complexity of this activity.

For all our documents we should consider creating text versions in email when  uploading to the site.  

Use of a tool

There are a number of WCAG compliance checkers available. As described above we use Userway on our site today.  We will need to determine if we want to spend around £400 per annum as a limited insurance against an AGAR review.

The Audit company will likely use another tool which, given the nature of the standard,    might easily throw up different issues. It will depend on whether the AGAR review is about determining overall compliance or whether failure on what might be relatively trivial issues constitutes an audit fail. The example of social media buttons (described below) would be an example. 

It also depends upon whether issues raised during the audit and resolved before the report is issued count as an audit fail. If issues can be resolved within the audit timescale then we can use the auditors tool to flag new issues and remediate them as part of the annual process. 

Structural Compliance issues

The following issues have been identified with our current site.

Area	Issue	Mitigation
Use of social media buttons	The buttons do not indicate that the link opens in another tab	Update buttons to include descriptions or remove social media buttons
Office Map	There is no description field i.e. This is a the location of the Parish Council	Update map to include the description remove the map
Menu	‘Open’ and ‘Close’ menu options do not have a description of their functions	Review the menu positioning and discuss with supplier
Menu	Keyboard only accessibility	Review the menu positioning and discuss with supplier or replace
Cookies	We do not have a cookie challenge on our site. This is because we do not track or target users and the only elements we hold in cookies relate to the active session and statistics.	Do not include a cookie challenge to ensure a simpler user experience.

 

Next Steps

Given WCAG compliance will form a part of the 2025/26 audit process we have some time to resolve the issues we face at the moment. An outline of the recommended steps are set out below.

1.Develop a process for managing existing and new content on our website.

2.Set a retention policy for website content

3.Remove content outside of policy

4.Resolve issues with website structure

5.Develop and implement a plan for future content

6.Develop and implement a plan for content remediation 

7.Consider the need for a compliance tool.

8.Determine the level of AGAR audit activity