Accessibility

What are we doing?

At North Devon Homes, we are committed to ensuring that our website is accessible to all users. We want everyone who visits our site to feel welcome and find the experience rewarding. To achieve this we've been using the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). These guidelines explain how to make web content more accessible for people with disabilities, and user friendly for everyone.

The guidelines have three levels of accessibility (A, AA and AAA). We’ve chosen Level AA as the target for the North Devon Homes website.

How are we doing?

We monitor the website regularly, but there may be some areas where we do not yet meet the guidelines but work is being carried out to get us up to AA compliance. If you do find any problems, please get in touch.

Need help reading our website?

We’ve added Recite Me digital inclusion software to our website. Recite Me helps you navigate around our site, understand our content and interact with our website independently. Just click the orange 'Accessibility and Languages' button in the bottom right hand corner of the website.

How does Recite Me help?

Recite Me is an accessibility software that provides a range of on-demand solutions to make websites more inclusive and accessible. Here’s how it helps:

1. WCAG Compliance: Recite Me supports websites in conforming to WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) standards.
2. Customisable User Experience: It offers customisable options to ensure that the website is user-friendly for individuals with disabilities, situational challenges, and those who speak English as a second language.
3. Assistive Toolbar: The Recite Me assistive toolbar allows visitors to customise the website content according to their needs. This includes changing the font size, style, and colour, magnifying areas of a page, adjusting the colour contrast, and reading sections of text aloud.
4. Language Support: It provides translation features to help users who speak English as a second language.
5. Website Accessibility Checker: This feature simplifies website accessibility and compliance.

By implementing these features, Recite Me helps create an inclusive online experience, making content accessible to a wider audience, including people who are neurodivergent, visually impaired, or of old age.

Areas Under Improvement

While we work diligently to enhance accessibility, there are areas where we are actively addressing compliance:

Non-compliance with the accessibility regulations

1. PDFs and non-HTML documents - many documents are not accessible in a number of ways including missing text alternatives, missing document structure and incorrect heading order. We are looking at ways to improve the accessibility of these documents but, if you find any that are hard to read, please contact us for an alternative.
2. Some video content may not have captions, transcripts or audio description. We are currently creating transcripts of older content and ensuring that all video content has captions.
3. Our website includes the use of online maps to show certain geographical information. These are not used for navigational purposes and are exempt under the regulations. If you require the information presented in an online map in a different format, please contact us to discuss reasonable adjustments.
4. Some of our services include third party content which we have no control over, such as documents which are sent to us and uploaded, social sharing icons on blogs and play buttons on videos. The accessibility regulations do not require us to manage these kinds of content but, if you have a problem with any of the content hosted on our websites, please contact us and we will try to help.

Let us know what you think

We value your feedback! If you encounter any issues or have suggestions for improvement, please get in touch:

• Email: [email protected]
• Phone: 01271 312500

Thank you for using the North Devon Homes website. We appreciate your input as we strive to create an inclusive online experience for all.