This accessibility statement applies to the West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership website at wyhpartnership.co.uk and westyorkshire.icb.nhs.uk
This website is run by West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership. We want as many people as possible to be able to use this website. We have set up this website so people can:
- choose different colours and contrasts
- change the size of the text
- navigate the website using just a keyboard
- navigate 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)
- we have also made the website text as simple as possible to understand.
AbilityNet has advice on making your device easier to use if you have a disability. We also talked to some people with different abilities at Bradford Talking Media to ask them about our website and what we should do to make it easier to read, look at and find your way around.
As well as accessibility and language tools built into the website, our website also has a licenced Recite Me accessiblity and language support toolbar since 2022, offerering a range of accessibility tools to our site visitors.
How accessible this website is
We know some parts of this website are not fully accessible. At the moment, here are some of the things we know are not fully accessible or could be improved:
- you cannot change the line height or spacing of text
- most older PDF documents are not fully accessible to screen reader software
- live video streams and our older videos do not have captions
- the search box doesn’t always give accurate results
- the pages on the site don’t all look the same
- some pages have too much information on
- some of the information is hard to understand if you don’t work for a health or care organisation
We are continuously working to make our website more accessible, our pages more consistent and our information easier to understand. Please see the "Non-accessible content" section of our accessibility statement for more detailed information about technical non-compliance issues.
Feedback and contact information
If you need information on this website in a different format like accessible PDF, large print, easy read, audio recording or braille:
- email Westyorkshire.
ICS @nhs.net - telephone 01924 317 659
- write to the communications department, West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership, White Rose House, West Parade, Wakefield, WF1 1LT
We’ll consider your request and get back to you within 21 days.
Reporting accessibility problems with this website
We’re 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, or you have a complaint, contact:
- email Westyorkshire.
ICS for the attention of the Communications Lead or Digital Communications Manager@nhs.net
- telephone 01924 317659 and ask for the Communications Lead or Digital Communications Manager
- write to the communications department, West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership, White Rose House, West Parade, Wakefield, WF1 1LT
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).
Technical information about this website’s accessibility
West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership 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 following non-compliances:
Non-accessible content
1. Images missing alternative text
- Some images added to our website before October 2020 do not have a text alternative, so people using a screen reader cannot access the information. This fails WCAG 2.1 success criterion 1.1.1 (non-text content). Since a review of the website October 2020, it has been our policy that all new images added to pages meet accessibility standards by including the use of alternate text. We support this policy by including accessibility training for all of our website editors.
2. Technical accessibility issues identified in October 2023
- There is no keyboard function when selecting 'Got it!' with the enter button in the cookie banner
- The keyboard focus is not visible on the dropdown menu 'Filter by category'
- The keyboard focus is not visible on the 'Select language' dropdown menu within the 'Accessibility tools' bar
- At 200% zoom, the keyboard focus becomes lost when tabbing past the hamburger menu. The keyboard tabs into the menu whilst the menu is still closed
- At 400% zoom, once opened the 'Accessibility tools' tab does not reflow to fit the webpage
- At 200% zoom, content within the hamburger menu does not have sufficient colour contrast. This refers to the white text on a light teal background
- Focusable content issue on the top navigation menu.
An accessibility review of the West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership website undertaken in August 2023 by the UK Government Digital Service (part of the Cabinet Office) found a number of issues which could affect users with access needs. We are working towards fixing all known accessibility issues listed in the review by 30 October 2023. An interim assessment and action log from our website provider and development partner, Frank Design, is avaialble to read and download (Microsoft Excel spreadsheet) whilst this work is in progress.
3. Inaccessible documents
The NHS West Yorkshire Integrated Care Board and West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership website hosts approximately 4063 documents. Some of these documents (which we upload in PDF and Microsoft Word format), spreadsheets and presentation files are essential to the people who work for the organisations we support. For example, we have PDFs with information about local health and care services, programmes and projects, PDFs of meeting notes and PDFs of reports. We also host some documents produced by local, regional or national partner organisations.
We plan to continue to produce PDFs on our website for the people who need them, and are working to make sure any new PDFs or Word documents we publish will meet accessibility standards. If you find a PDF, Word document, Excel spreadsheet or PowerPoint presentation on our website which is inaccessible, please contact us for an alternate version:
- email Westyorkshire.
ICS for the attention of the Communications Lead or Digital Communications Manager@nhs.net - telephone 01924 317659 and ask for the Communications Lead or Digital Communications Manager
- write to the communications department, West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership, White Rose House, West Parade, Wakefield, WF1 1LT
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.
4. Other known issues
- you cannot change the line height or spacing of text
- live video streams and our older videos do not have captions
- the search box doesn’t always give accurate results
- the pages on the site don’t all look the same
- some pages have too much information on
- some of the information is hard to understand if you don’t work for a health or care organisation
Disproportionate burden
The cost of changing some of the content we link to from this website would be disproportionately high. This includes some older videos which are not captioned, and some PDFs.
West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership conducted a disproportionate burden assessment for the Partnership’s website, wypartnership.co.uk in September 2020 using the GOV.UK guidance on Public sector website and mobile application accessibility monitoring.
Our cost benefit exercise was conducted by governance and communications colleagues from within the Partnership with advice from our equality, diversity and inclusion lead, information governance and IT services. This was conducted as part of a wider review of the website to improve processes around accessibility, information governance and website content management training for staff.
- The disproportionate burden cost benefit assessment portion of this exercise comprised:
- A document audit of the website, specifically a count of the total number of documents stored on the website’s “Files” area
- Procuring an estimated cost from our third party website provider to review and assess the accessibility of documents, and to make necessary content amends
- An in-organisation estimate the amount of time it would take colleagues within the Partnership to make necessary content amends
- An assessment of requests for website content in accessible format from site visitors, where information had not originally been produced as such
The West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership website was expanded to incorporate NHS West Yorkshire Integrated Care Board (ICB) in July 2022, and at our annual website accessibility review accessibility review in September 2022, a decision was taken to undergo a new disproportionate burden assessment in the first quarter of the 2023/2024 fiscal year. Subsequently, NHS West Yorkshire Integrated Care Board moved into a statutory review of our operating model and running cost allowance and this assessment was postponed until September 2023.
This assessment is currently underway, and is being conducted in a similar way to our initial evaluation with an additional, more formal assessment undertaken by the NHS West Yorkshire Integrated Care Board governance department looking at statutory documents produced by the ICB such as meeting papers, minutes and policies. Again, the timescale for actions resulting from the assessment is being affected by the ICB operating model consultation, but the assessment itself is currently underway. The actions taken so far are:
- A website document audit from our third party website provider, including an estimated cost to review and assess the accessibility of documents, and to make necessary content amends
- An assessment of requests for website content in accessible format from site visitors, where information had not originally been produced
- A full review of our organisation’s training offer to staff on the production of accessible information, and as result a mandatory training course to launch in April 2024 with supporting materials for staff produced by our equality, diversity and inclusion lead
Supporting information for our ongoing disproportionate burden assessment is available on request. Please email Westyorkshire.
Navigation and accessing information
We are currently looking at navigation to see if there are any problems. Please report any problems you find to:
- email Westyorkshire.
ICS for the attention of the Communications Lead or Digital Communications Manager@nhs.net
- telephone 01924 317659 and ask for the Communications Lead or Digital Communications Manager
- write to the communications department, West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership, White Rose House, West Parade, Wakefield, WF1 1LT
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
We are working with Bradford Talking Media to ask them about our website and what we should do to make it more accessible.
We are also working with Frank Design, the company who made and manage our website, to fix all the parts of our website that are not accessible, and to make improvements to make our website more accessible in future.
We did a review of our accessibility training for staff in October 2023, and as result we plan to launch a mandatory training course in April 2024, along with support materials for staff such as videos and short "how to" guides.
Where the pages on the site don’t all look the same, we are re-designing the pages to be more consistent. An example of the new design can be seen on the Improving Population Health and Urgency and Emergency Care programme sections. All our programmes will have the same design in 2024.
Where some pages have too much information on and some of the information is hard to understand if you don’t work for a health or care organisation, we are working with Partnership colleagues who produce information for the website to help them write better pages. We are planning a mandatory accessibility training course to launch in April 2024.
Where the search box doesn't always give accurate results, we are training staff who write our website pages to provide extra information which will help improve search results.
Preparation of this accessibility statement
This statement was originally prepared on 1 April 2020.
It has been reviewed on:
- 17 November 2023
- 16 October 2023
- 21 October 2022
- 8 September 2020
This website was last fully accessibilty tested on 3 August 2020. The test was carried out by our website prodiver, Frank Design.
It was reviewed on 7 August 2023 by the UK Government Digital Service.
Our next full website accessibilty test is scheduled for March 2024.