Accessibility statement

This accessibility statement applies to St Helens Borough Council's website, https://www.sthelens.gov.uk. This website is run by St Helens Borough Council alongside our technical partner, GOSS Interactive.

How accessible this website is

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

most older PDF documents are not fully accessible to screen reader software
some of our documents aren't fully accessible to screen readers
some of our live video streams do not have captions

Feedback and contact information

If you use assistive technology (such as a screen reader) and/or need a version of any document or information on this website in a different format, like accessible PDF, large print, easy read, audio recording or braille, then please let us know:

Make an enquiry

Telephone: 01744 676789 (9am to 5pm weekdays, 10am to 2pm Saturdays)

Post: Customer Service Hub, Town Hall, Victoria Square, St Helens, WA10 1HP

Please make your enquiry for the attention of St Helens Borough Council's Customer Relationship Manager and the subject or reference as "Website Information - Different Format Request". Please include as much detail as possible - such as the document or information you want to view, and what format you need. It will also help us if you say what assistive technology you use.

St Helens Borough Council will make all reasonable adjustments to remove or lessen barriers to disabled customer access. We will consider your request and get back to you in 10 working days.

Reporting accessibility problems with this website

St Helens Borough Council is 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, please get in touch with us using the options above.

Please make your enquiry for the attention of St Helens Borough Council's Customer Relationship Manager and the subject or reference as "Website Accessibility Improvement Request". Please include as much detail as possible.

St Helens Borough Council will make all reasonable adjustments to remove or lessen barriers to disabled customer access.

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 by phone or visiting us in person

The council's Contact Centre at Wesley House is fully accessible: with accessible signage, wheelchair access, loop hearing aid system, staff who can use British Sign Language, access to translation and interpretation services, minicom, fax, email, text, website and telephone. Find out how to contact us.

Technical information about this website's accessibility

St Helens Borough Council is committed to making its website accessible, in accordance with the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018.

Compliance status

This website is partially compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1 AA standard, due to the non-compliances and exemptions listed below.

Non-accessible content

The content that is not accessible is outlined below with details of:

where it fails the success criteria
planned dates for when issues will be fixed

Images and buttons

Some of our images do not have alt text attributed to them. This fails WCAG 2.1A 1.1.1 success criterion (Non-text content).

PDFs and other documents

Many of our 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 2.1A 4.1.2 success criterion (Name, Role, Value) or 1.3.1 (Info and Relationships).

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

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.

Live video

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

What we're doing to improve accessibility

Our website is accessible by design and all content that is published is checked by a team of editors to ensure it meets accessibility requirements. We will conduct regular in-depth audits to ensure we are compliant with the AA standard.

We are continuing to work through the aforementioned issues on our website, with the aim of fixing these by December 2022, and will ensure that any new content published on the site is fully accessible.