Accessibility statement for Kettering General Hospital NHS Foundation Trust

This accessibility statement applies to Kettering General Hospital NHS Foundation Trust  www.kgh.nhs.uk .
 
This website is run by Kettering General Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. We 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 size using browser or device settings
  • zoom in up to 400% without the text spilling off the screen
  • listen to most of the website using a screen reader (including the most recent versions of JAWS, NVDA and VoiceOver).We’ve 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 know some parts of this website are not fully accessible:
  • you cannot modify the line height or spacing of text
  • most older PDF documents are not fully accessible to screen reader software
  • live video streams do not have captions
  • some videos embedded into pages may not have subtitles or transcripts

Feedback and contact information

If you find any problems not listed on this page or think we’re not meeting accessibility requirements, or if you need information on this website in a different format like accessible PDF, large print, easy read, audio recording or braille contact the Communications Team:
If you cannot view the map on our ‘contact us’ page, call or email us Contact Us for directions.

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

Kettering General Hospital NHS Foundation Trust 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

The website has been tested against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 AA standard.
This website is partially compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.2 AA standard, due to the following non-compliances:
  • Controls are not clearly indicated when they are selected
  • The forms do not have sufficient contrast with their surroundings
  • The links are not distinguished by more than just colour
  • Not all of our content reaches our target reading age of 12 years old

Non-accessible content

The content listed below is non-accessible for the following reasons.

Non-compliance with the accessibility regulations

Some images do not have a text alternative, so people using a screen reader cannot access the information. This fails WCAG 2.2 success criterion 1.1.1 (non-text content). 
 
We plan to add text alternatives for all images by October 2024. When we publish new content we’ll make sure our use of images m eets accessibility standards.
 
  • Ensure controls clearly indicate when they are selected. This fails WCAG 2.2 AA 2.4.22. We plan to fix this by August 2024.
  • Ensure form controls contrast sufficiently with their surroundings. This fails WCAG 2.1 AA 1.4.11. We plan to fix this by August 2024.
  • Ensure links are distinguished by more than just colour. This fails WCAG 2.0 A 1.4.1. We plan to fix this by August 2024.
  • Not all of our content reaches our target reading age of 12 years old. This fails WCAG 3.1.5 (Reading Level).  We are resol ving this as content comes up through its review cycle, and this should be largely complete by May 2025.

Third-party content

Our website contains third-party content. We do not have control over and are not responsible for the accessibility of this content, but we endeavour to work with the third party to improve its accessibility.
 

Issues with interactive tools and transactions

Some parts of this site link to our use content provided by other websites and these are not always as accessible as our site. Examples of these are:
  • Some videos on our website are hosted by 3 rd  party video hosting providers, such as YouTube. We are unable to fix these issues, however will provide captions through our developer studios to improve user experience.
  • Embedded posts from social media channels like Facebook or X may not be fully accessible. However, we follow all best practice when posting on corporate social media channels.
  • We use a third party service called Trac to advertise jobs on our ‘Work for Us’ section of the website, we are working with this third party supplier to ensure the content displayed on our website meets the required accessibility standards.

Disproportionate burden

Historical PDF Document Conversion

A assessment has been carried out that relates to PDF documents no longer in active use only. We are fully committed to making all active documentation fully accessible, as HTML web pages and other appropriate file types, and hope to have completed this process by the end of 2025.
 
We have prioritised the documents which get the highest amount of use on our site, and most information on our site is accessible already.

Benefits

The benefits of making these PDFs into accessible HTML formats would be:
  • The documents would be fully accessible to all users
  • The documents would be more easily searchable and indexable

Burden

Our assessment of the burden of making PDFs into accessible HTML formats is that:
  • there are thousands of documents created by the organisation
  • each document would require a number of hours of work to be recreated into a fully accessible HTML page (we estimate, based from experience from converting documents, each document could take anywhere between 2 to 30 hours to complete. This is dependant on the length and complexity of the documents and requiring relevant work to be signed-off where required)
  • some of the documents are officially published (e.g. Official or National Statistics) and publishing a new version requires detailed checking, a formal sign-off process, and submitting a new official version to the national statistician
  • many documents contain complex elements such as tables and graphs which are difficult to convert    

Other factors

Also relevant to this decision are that:
  • Interest in the proposed documents is low with few people accessing them
  • Of the proposed documents, requests for additional accessible versions are rare
  • We will and do assist with accessible versions on request

Assessment

Where documents are no longer updated or in active use, there is a high cost in terms of employee hours to convert them to an accessible format. Interest in these documents is limited, but we will always respond to requests for different formats for our publications on a case-by-case basis so that accessible versions are available where requested.
 
We consider that the costs of converting older documents where there is little demand would be a poor use of limited staff time and would represent a disproportionate burden on the organisation in terms of cost.

Navigation and accessing information

There’s no way to skip the repeated content in the page header (for example, a ‘skip to main content’ option).
It’s not always possible to change the device orientation from horizontal to vertical without making it more difficult to view the content.
 
It’s not possible for users to change text size without some of the content overlapping.
 
We’ve assessed the cost of fixing the issues with navigation and accessing information. We believe that doing so now would be a disproportionate burden within the meaning of the accessibility regulations. We will make another assessment when the supplier contract is up for renewal.

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

Maps

Online maps - those embedded from digital mapping services such as Google Maps, and maps made available in formats such as PDF - are exempt from meeting the accessibility regulations. However, we will always attempt to provide as much related information as possible in text, e.g. postcodes and directions.

PDFs and other documents

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. For example, we do not plan to fix  Annual report 2017/18.pdf .
 
Any new PDFs or Word documents we publish will meet accessibility standards.

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 continuously looking at ways we can improve our website’s accessibility based on user testing and automated tests.
We are working to remove inaccessible documents and to republish them in HTML format.

Preparation of this accessibility statement

This statement was prepared in June 2024. It was last reviewed in August 2024.
This website was last tested in June 2024  against the WCAG 2.2 AA standard.
The test was carried out by Kettering General Hospital NHS Foundaion Trust. The most viewed pages were tested using automated testing tools by our website team.