Our accessibility roadmap shows how we plan to improve accessibility on www.fife.gov.uk
This work will be undertaken over the next 12 months.
Some of the issues that we are currently working on
Issue | Resolution | Target Date |
|---|---|---|
Accessibility Statements for all third party systems/applications we use, that the public access | Create a standard form of words with links to the relevant third party accessibility statements and apply this approach to all systems/applications. | May 2024 |
| Accessibility issues with emails from website systems | We will work to increase the size of text on emails where our systems allow us to. We will include a reply email address when we send from no.reply@fife.gov.uk, if replies requiring answers are expected. | May 2024 |
Inaccessible PDFs and other documents | PDF’s and publications on the site are being reviewed and removed or made accessible as required, as part of the programme of content improvement work planned for 2023/24. A working group is now in place and is looking at the process for the compilation and display of Committee Papers to work towards a solution. | Ongoing |
Resolved issues
The following issues have now been resolved.
Resolved issue | Notes | Date Resolved |
|---|---|---|
WCAG issues identified by the Government Digital Service in June 2020 | All issues have been addressed and improvements are now live. This involved some internal work and external work with our website provider. Examples of the improvements were coding and scaling of text-based controls. Fixes put in place should address the issues identified on the pages identified and also across the whole site. | October 2020 |
Internal accessibility testing of the website | Internal testing is now taking place using JAWS. Regular use of Codesniffer has been implemented and issues identified will be addressed as required. | Ongoing |
Accessibility Statement | Our existing Accessibility Statement has been reviewed and was published on the website. | 16th September 2020 |
Cookie issue picked up by JAWS | The issue picked up has been resolved. Additional changes to JAWS reader accessibility were applied. | 22nd October 2020 |
Victoria Forms | The EFS 8.1 upgrade patch has now been applied to our EFS system. This should hopefully prevent forms with blank user groups appearing on our system now. This update also includes a number of changes to help accessible users navigate our forms, such as improvements to the form controls. | October 2020 |
Some elements did not have sufficient colour contrast | We added styles to our theme to address this. This related to content from our old site Fife Direct, which was decommissioned early in 2021. | March 2021 |
Some pages still linked to our old website Fife Direct | The style sheet issues were fixed. Our old site Fife Direct was decommissioned early in 2021. | December 2020 |
Captions on videos | A review was carried out and gaps addressed. This will be monitored on an ongoing basis. Videos that go up from YouTube must have captions. Limited control over third party videos. | Ongoing |
Employee Information | Issues with the accessibility of the Employee Information section of the site were resolved when the content was moved to an internal system. | February 2021 |
| Some of our PDF and MS Word documents do not meet accessibility standards |
Work done with Democratic Services to review Committee paper template to ensure reports are accessible going forward. A reduced number of editors will ensure that we work to reduce the number of PDF’s on our site and that those that are added going forward, are accessible. Training on making Word documents accessible has been made available for staff. | May 2021 |
Some images do not have alternative text explanations | Review work has been carried out and gaps addressed as required. Going forward the external tool will help with this. Training is being carried out with services. | September 2021 |
| External audit of website | Baseline audit completed by the external company Silktide. Details of this testing have been added to our Accessibility Statement. Accessibility of the website will now be monitored on an ongoing basis using Silktide and areas for improvement scheduled into online services team workload. | March 2022 |
| Mini-sites | All Fife Council associated sites have now been brought into our content management system. All mini-sites (those with and without fife.gov URL’s) are now being picked up in the checks by the Silktide tool, to ensure accessibility compliance. | August 2022 |
Accessibility Statements on all mini-sites and the Health and Social Care Partnership website | All mini-sites and the Health and Social Care Partnership website now have a link to the Fife Council Accessibility Statement. | 30th June 2023 |
Maps, Council Tax Payment Form, Planning simple search | Additional areas have been highlighted through internal audit and are being looked at. We will work with our external suppliers to ensure accessibility compliance as far as possible but unfortunately we still have old systems in place. Guidance is now in place so that any new software must be at least AA complaint. | August 2023 |
