Accessibility of other NRW websites
This accessibility statement applies to naturalresources.wales
This website is run by Natural Resources Wales (NRW). We want everyone to be able to access our websites. This means, for example, that you should be able to:
We are working to make the website text easy 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, for example:
If you need information from any of our websites in a different format, such as accessible PDFs, large print, easy read, audio recording or braille:
Natural Resources Wales
Customer Care Centre
Ty Cambria
29 Newport Rd
Cardiff
CF24 0TP
We’ll consider your request and get back to you in 5 working days.
We’re always looking to improve the accessibility of all our websites. If you find any problems not listed on this page or think we’re not meeting accessibility requirements, please email the NRW Digital Team digital@naturalresourceswales.gov.uk
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).
Natural Resources Wales is committed to making its websites 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 and exemptions listed below.
The content listed below is non-accessible for the following reasons.
We are continuing to work on fixing these accessibility problems, as part of our accessibility roadmap.
Most of our guidance was created before September 2018 and is published in Word, Excel or PDF format. Many of these documents are not formatted in such a way as to be accessible to a screen reader. This doesn’t meet WCAG 2.1 success criterion 4.1.2
New guidance will be published as web-pages where possible. Any new documents we publish will meet accessibility standards.
Most of our forms were published before September 2018. They are in PDF, Word and Excel and are not accessible.
We are working to convert our most used forms to accessible online forms. 30% of our most used application forms have been converted so far and this work will continue as part of our roadmap of accessibility improvements.
Any new application forms will be published as accessible online forms.
We are aware of the following issues with the links on our site:
We carry out regular checks of any newly broken links on our webpages, and fix as soon as they are identified.
We will not fix broken links in documents published before September 2018, if it's not essential for a user to access a service.
When we publish new content, we'll make sure our links meet accessibility standards.
Maps embedded into our website are not accessible.
The list view of places to visit is an accessible alternative to the days out map.
Papers and minutes from NRW Board meetings and forums published before September 2020 are not accessible as they are not tagged up properly.
Any new board papers and minutes from September 2020 will be as accessible as possible.
Some reports and technical documents published after September 2018 are not accessible documents, and may include:
We have attempted to make research and report documents from September 2019 as accessible as possible.
We use a product called Hotjar to help us gather feedback from people about their experience of using our website. This is only accessible if you use a mouse to click on it. We have asked the supplier to resolve the issues.
If you are unable to use our ‘Feedback’ button, please use our alternative feedback form to tell us about your experience.
Some of the services you may access online with Natural Resources Wales are hosted on separate websites to the main naturalresources.wales site.
The summary of accessibility status of NRW's other websites explains the current accessibility status of other NRW websites.
We have prioritised reviewing and fixing accessibility issues on our websites with the highest number of people accessing them for the most critical services.
Improvements will be part of our roadmap of future work.
We don't plan to fix the following, as they are exempt in the regulations.
The majority of our older PDFs, Excel files and Word documents don’t meet accessibility standards - for example, they may not be structured so they’re accessible to a screen reader. This doesn’t meet WCAG 2.1 and success criterion 4.1.2.
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.
We therefore don't plan to fix the following information if it was published before 23 September 2018:
Our Designated sites search includes over 10,000 historical documents, some of which may be exempt from the regulations (e.g maps), but some may be considered to be guidance. It would take a considerable amount of time and money to fully review and address these, therefore, we have assessed that this would be a disproportionate burden at this time.
Any new documents we publish will be made as accessible as possible.
We are actively looking to improve the accessibility on our website.
The following are some of the areas we are focussing on over the next 12 months to make our website more accessible.
We will update our list of things we've done to make our website more accessible and meet the accessibility regulations.
This statement was prepared on 22 September 2020. It was last reviewed on 22 September 2020.
This website was last tested in June 2020. Tests have been carried out by Zoonou and continue to be made by internal testers as we progress with fixing problems identified.
The testers used a representative sample of the websites as defined by the Website Accessibility Conformance Evaluation Methodology (WCAG-EM).
Our test partner tested this site by manually reviewing representative URLs of all the templates as well as providing the results of a scan of the whole site to report issues that could be detected by automation.
We also use SiteMorse to run automated scans of broken links and missing alternative text for images issues on a regular basis.