Website Accessibility

This website is for residents and visitors to North Petherton to provide up to date information regarding activities in the community. This includes Town Council activities, forthcoming events and information relating to the community.

This accessibility statement applies to: North Petherton Town Council

This website is run by North Petherton Town Council who 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)

The website text is as simple as possible to understand. AbilityNet has advice on making your device easier to use if you have a disability.

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

• Some legacy PDF documents are not fully accessible to screen reader software

If you need information on this website in a different format like accessible PDF, large print, easy read, audio recording or braille please email the Clerk at: joy.norris@northpethertontowncouncil.gov.uk.

Your request will be considered, and a reply will be given within fourteen days.

If you cannot view the map on our home page, please email the Clerk at: joy.norris@northpethertontowncouncil.gov.uk for directions.

North Petherton Town Council strive to improve the accessibility of this website. If you find any problems not listed on this page or think it is not meeting accessibility requirements, contact the Clerk to the Council by email: joy.norris@northpethertontowncouncil.gov.uk

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).

Contact by phone is only possible by contacting the Clerk to the Council. Please use the contact details shown on the council contact page of the website.

Visiting in person may be possible by prior arrangement via the Clerk.

North Petherton Town Council is committed to making this website accessible, in accordance with the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018.

Compliance status – This website is not yet fully compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.2 AA standard. This is something we are urgently addressing. Our progress can be tracked using the audit below. 

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

• PDFs and other documents

Any new PDFs or Word documents we publish will meet accessibility standards.

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.

We do not plan to have live video streams. If at a later stage, there are live video streams we do not plan to add captions because live video is exempt for meeting the accessibility regulations.

This statement was prepared on 1 December 2025 by SlashDotDash Ltd

In order to improve the website an annual accessibility audit is undertaken using the WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool. Each page is given a rating out of 10. 

Following a recent audit, our website has been given a score of 9.96/10 (average score from all pages). The outcome of the full audit can be seen below. There are some pages which do not currently have the top score. Work is being carried out on pages that do not yet have the full score. 

Work to be completed includes

• Checking accessibility of document downloads (PDF, DOCX, XLSX)

Outcome WCAG interim audit 01/05/2026 – The website continues to improve its accessibility and unlike many council sites NPTC has undertaken an audit of every page. Overall the WAVE score has increased and a manual audit has also been completed. The manual audit identified 7 potential errors across the entire website. 4 of of the potential errors were reviewed and found not to impact the user. The remaining 3 errors are from the use of a 3rd-party plugin and how it renders content. 

This website is as accessible as it can be at this time.

In addition to ensuring each page is WCAG compliant, NPTC has installed the Userway accessibility tool to go beyond the minimum requirements of WCAG 2.2AA.

Please note that the accessibility of PDF, docx, xlsx, pptx documents has not been assessed. Where possible documents have been turned into web-pages.

1st June 2026 – This website is WCAG 2.2AA compliant with the following allowable exceptions:

• Documents published BEFORE September 23, 2018: These existing documents are generally exempt from retrospective WCAG retrofitting, provided they are not essential to active, ongoing public services.
• 3 errors from use of 3rd party plugin software.