Accessibility statement

We want everyone who visits our website to be able to access the full range of services available, regardless of their skill or technology.

This website was launched in September 2017.

How accessible the site is

We know some parts of this website aren’t fully accessible:

What to do if you have problems or queries

If you have any accessibility problems or feedback, please use our contact us page [LINK].

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) is responsible for enforcing the accessibility regulations. If you're not happy with how we respond, please contact the Equality Advisory and Support Service (EASS).

Technical information about this website’s accessibility

Durham Music is committed to making our website accessible, in accordance with The Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018.

Under the Equality Act 2010 we must ensure we do not unlawfully discriminate in our service delivery and make reasonable adjustments for people with disabilities where necessary. We are constantly working to improve the accessibility and usability of our site.

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

Non compliance with the accessibility regulations

Information about which areas of the website fail.

• hidden elements: an element with aria-hidden=true contains focusable content, failing success criterion 1.3.1
• background colours: some text / background colours do not have enough contrast, failing success criterion 1.4.3
• form field labels: some are not unique or are not enclosed in a fieldset with a legend to make them unique, and fail success criterion 2.4.6
• frames and iframes: some do not have a title attribute, failing success criterion 2.4.1
• headings: empty headings fail success criterion 2.4.6
• images: alt text should not contain placeholders like 'picture' or 'spacer' failing success criterion 1.1.1
• images: some images do not have an alt tag, failing success criterion 1.1.1
• images in documents: some images / figures do not have an alt tag, failing success criterion 1.1.1
• links: links use generic link text that has no context, such as 'click here', failing success criterion 2.4.4
• elements: some elements do not contain text or an img with an alt attribute, failing success criteria 2.4.4, 2.4.9 and 4.1.2
• document titles: some documents have no title failing success criterion 2.4.2
• page language: this is not declared, failing success criterion 3.1.1
• keyboard users: onclick handlers do not have an equivalent onkeyup or onkeydown handler, failing success criterion 2.1.1
• form field labels: some are not unique or are not enclosed in a fieldset with a legend to make them unique, and fail success criterion 2.4.6
• tables: heading elements are not declared and role=presentation is not used, failing success criterion 1.3.1
• tables: summary attribute or caption missing for layout tables, failing success criterion 1.3.1
• documents: PDFs are not tagged so are not accessible by screen readers, failing success criterion 1.3.1
• markup: the stylesheet font-weight property is used rather than semantic markup like strong, failing success criterion 1.3.1 
• stylesheets: some content is in stylesheet, making it unavailable to screen readers and users who are not using the stylesheet, failing success criterion 1.3.1
• elements:  element header appears as a descendant of the header element, failing success criterion 4.1.1
• autocomplete: there is a bad value for the attribute, failing success criterion 1.3.5
• role: there is a bad value for the attribute, failing success criterion 4.1.2
• IDs: some pages has duplicate IDs which cause problems in screen readers, failing success criterion 4.1.1

Accessibility Roadmap

As stated in the non-compliance section, the known issues are listed below:

• HTML – the underlying code used to create this website.
• CSS – used to describe how HTML elements are displayed on this website.
• JavaScript – a development language used to program behaviours on this website.
• 3rd Party Functionality
• Content - this could include web page content or associated PDFs on this website.

A program of work is now underway to address these issues and involves working with Durham County Council’s in-house developers/designers as well as third party functionality providers.

We aim to resolve the above items by September 2021.

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

• PDFs/documents (pre September 2018): PDFs or other documents published before 23 September 2018 or documents that are not essential to providing our services
• pre-recorded audio and video published before 23 September 2020

• live audio and video

• interactive maps unless they provide core information

How we test the site

We re-assess a website or system for accessibility whenever it undergoes a major modification.

We check all new content we add.