Accessibility Statement

This accessibility statement applies to information and services on HealthWise Wales

This website’s accessibility

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

Most older PDF documents are not fully accessible to screen reader software
Some of our links still use ambiguous text such as ‘click here’

What to do if you can’t access parts of this website

If you need information on this website in a different format like accessible PDF, large print, easy read, audio recording or braille:

email Healthwisewales@cardiff.ac.uk
call 0800 9 172 172 09:00-17:00 Monday-Friday.
Please note that due to COVID-19 our telephone lines are currently closed.
Please contact us using the email above.

We’ll consider your request and get back to you in 3-5 working days depending on the nature of your query.

Reporting accessibility issues with this website

We’re always looking to improve the accessibility of this website. If you find any problems that aren’t listed on this page or think we’re not meeting the requirements of the accessibility regulations, contact: Healthwisewales@cardiff.ac.uk.

Enforcement procedure

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

Technical information about this website’s accessibility

HealthWise Wales is committed to making its website accessible, in accordance with the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018.

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

Technology problems

Our website currently uses 3rd party embedded logic to pull in twitter feeds, and to create social media sharing tags.

At present these produce potentially inaccessible content, such as images without alternative (alt) text and table structures used for layout.

We are working to replace these with API driven alternatives that will not create inaccessible content, we plan to implement this by December 2021.

Issues with text

Some hyperlink text does not make sense when read on its own (for example, ‘click here’).
We plan to fix the existing links by end of September 2021.
When we publish new content, we will make sure link text meets accessibility standards.

Issues with PDFs and other documents

Some of our older PDFs and Word documents don’t meet accessibility standards - for example, they may not be marked up so they’re accessible to a screen reader.

None of our PDF and Word documents are essential to providing our service and request for service can be directed to Healthwisewales@cardiff.ac.uk, if required.

The accessibility regulations don’t require us to fix PDFs or other documents published before 23 September 2018 if they’re not essential to providing our services.

Any new PDFs or Word documents we publish will meet accessibility standards.

Issues with images, video and audio

Some of our 3rd party tracking code (Twitter/Google Analytics etc) makes use of image tags without alt tags.

These tags are outside our direct control, we are investigating changes to the tracking code which will enable better support for alt tags.

We will implement these changes by December 2021.

Issues with interactive elements and transactions

Some of our links are duplicated across multiple display components.

These links are accessible, but we recognise that they may cause some context issues for screen reader users and we will address these when we complete our next major website redesign, which we expect will be in 2021.

How we tested this website

This website was last tested on 20/09/2020. The test was carried out by Cardiff University, Centre for Trials Research.

We tested all user navigable sections of the https://www.healthwisewales.gov.wales website. This included registration, login and other user interaction pages.
Additionally, we tested a random 10% sample of questionnaires available within the data collection platform. Our questionnaires have been programmatically implemented and so we expected errors to be consistently visible across different pages.

This statement was prepared on 22/09/2020. It was last updated on 23/06/2021.