Greater Hollington Partnership

The statement above could not be further from the truth. Providing public access to all the documents means making them accessible to everyone, not just the majority. The better way to comment on this is to list the sections that aren't accessible, rather than list what is.

What's inaccessible

• The introduction - People that are blind or visually impaired cannot interact with the Flash introduction. Thankfully, there is a 'skip intro' image but the problem with that is the alt attribute is empty so it doesn't tell someone screen reading what the image represents. Since it's the only option on the screen, I guess people won't go too far wrong there.
• Everything - Screen readers will hear nothing but "You are visitor ??? to this site". Very useful. Since everything is image based, blind users can forget using this website. Nothing is represented as it should be and even zoom tool users will struggle as the fonts within the images are low quality even on my very expensive and high resolution 21 inch Sony monitor. What chance does anyone else have who lives with visual impairments and a 3 year old 15 inch screen.
• Delivery plan - Fancy script that displays when you hover your mouse over it doesn't impress people using tools without script support. Again, image based without text representation only compounds the problems.
• Contact - The only link that can be identified by a screen reader is the email link, but only because it uses the mailto: prefix in it's address. Being image based means it's won't be obvious.
• Magazines - PDF documents of the magazines published are in text format so can be read but the links to them are image based without text alternative and also do not warn of the document type either.
• Press releases - About 85% images containing text. Why aren't they in a text format in the first place? Images cannot be screen read, consumed by tools that assist dyslexia, are useless with zoom tools and many more.

What's unusable

• Framesets - Although frames can be made accessible, these are not. Frame names such as "upper", "left" and "main" mean very little to anyone that is presented with such names. Which one is the content? Which one is the navigation? Frames also break printing in some browsers and bookmarking too. The only relief is that each page has it's own frameset so is uniquely addressed.
• Delivery plans - When you select a delivery plan, the links are presented at the top of the page in another frame. Problematic as that is, it can just about be dealt with. However, the colours form a halo effect and are trouble for anyone other than perfect eyesight, which I believe to be around 30% of the population. The optional menus appear when you hover over some of the primary plan links, but they are also presented in the same colour and because only script can access them, there of no use to anyone not supporting the technology. Oh, and the secondary links are also image based so inaccessible to blind, visually impaired, dyslexic and zoom tool users.

To conclude

That's probably enough for now. In their defence the website is probably home grown and it is a public funded organisation but being a public service means that it must be accessible to all. Someone within the organisation needs to know that the website currently fails to comply with basic minimum accessibility standards and is liable for prosecution under the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, of which, Part III covers websites and did so since 1999.

I'd tell them myself but I didn't get a response when I initially informed them about it.