Contact information

If you need help to use this website, or information in a different format you can:

• email online@barnsley.gov.uk
• call 01226 773555
• or visit our contact us webpage (for more phone numbers)

We'll consider your request and get back to you within five working days.

If you've asked us for help to use an online form we'll either:

• support you to fill the form in during the call
• put you in touch with someone who can help

You can contact us to make an appointment if you want to visit one of our offices. Please tell us about any access needs you have. 

We provide a text relay service and an online video relay service for people who are deaf, hearing impaired or have a speech impediment. Our offices have audio induction loops and we can arrange a British Sign Language (BSL) interpreter. 

Reporting any accessibility problems with this website

We're always looking for ways to improve our website. You can tell us your feedback by filling in the online form on our contact us webpage.

If you think we're not meeting the accessibility requirements, please let us know by emailing digitalteam@barnsley.gov.uk.

Enforcement procedure

If you're not happy with how we respond to your request you can contact the Equality Advisory and Support Service (EASS). They are responsible for enforcing the Public Sector Bodies (Website and Mobile Applications) (No.2) Accessibility Regulations 2018.

Technical information about this website's accessibility

Barnsley Council is committed to making this 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 2.2 AA standard due to the non-compliances listed below.

Non-accessible content

Maps

Some webpages with embedded maps are not fully accessible. A screen reader may not be able to read aloud the contents of the map.

Where an online form contains a map, for example to report something, it is fully accessible because we have provided a text alternative. 

It's our ambition to provide a fully accessible alternative for all maps containing essential information. We'll confirm the timescales for this when we've found an accessible solution.

If you need any content from a map in a different format please contact us. 

PDFs published before September 2020

We've made our PDF documents accessible to meet the requirements of the accessibility legislation. We've also converted many of our PDF application forms into eForms to improve accessibility and usability. We routinely check and remove any PDFs that have passed the date of them being useful.

Any new documents published from 23 September 2020 are accessible. Our ambition is to reduce the number of PDF documents on our website and replace them with web content where we can. It's not possible for us to do this in every instance, but we'll continue to review the purpose and use of PDFs and make sure that any published meet the accessibility standards.

Some PDF documents that were published on this website before 23 September 2020 that we need to keep may not be fully accessible. This is usually due to the size of the document, the complexity and whether we have an original version that was produced by the council. Some of the documents that aren't fully accessible are: 

• some planning documents 
• some infographics of research, data and statistics
• statements of accounts
• a small number of strategies that we know are not used very often

We'll continue to review these documents, unpublish them when we can and improve any that remain.

You can contact us to request an accessible version of any of these documents. We'll take into consideration the type of information and whether we can provide it in a different format.

Third party content

We use some third party websites for council services. We work with the suppliers of these websites to check and advise on any accessibility issues. Read our list of websites for details.

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

The following content is exempt from the accessibility regulations. We'll consider any requests for accessible versions of this content at our discretion.

• PDFs and other documents published before 23 September 2018 - 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. For example, we don't plan to fix some of our strategy and policy documents. 
• Live video - we don't plan to add captions to live video streams because live video is exempt from meeting the accessibility regulations.
• Heritage collections including scanned manuscripts and archive materials.
• Maps that don't contain essential information.
• Third party content that isn't within our control, such as social media 'like' buttons.

Disproportionate burden

We want our website and documents to be accessible for everyone. We monitor and fix accessibility issues where we can, some of these being simpler to resolve than others. We aren't, however, claiming that any of the issues are a disproportionate burden to fix. This accessibility statement lists any issues that we're aware of and our plan to fix them. 

How we tested this website

This website, www.barnsley.gov.uk is tested weekly.

Our tests include:

• an automated testing tool provided by Siteimprove to test every published page on our website
• Adobe Acrobat Pro to test and fix PDF documents
• human testing for usability 

We run a full automated accessibility test on our website each week and fix any issues that are found. If any issues take longer to fix we'll publish details of them on our accessibility statement. 

We intend to introduce more manual (human) testing to support our routine tests.

Preparation of this accessibility statement

This accessibility statement was last updated on 3 September 2024.

We'll review it again before 31 December 2024.