Accessibility statement

Please use the contact details below if you need information on this website in a different format, like accessible PDF, large print, easy read, audio recording or braille. We are always looking to improve the accessibility of this website. If you find any problems not listed on this page or think we are not meeting accessibility requirements, please do let us know:

Email: hiowicb-hsi.communications@nhs.net

Call: 0300 561 0939

Write to: 

NHS Hampshire and Isle of Wight Integrated Care Board

Hampshire Fire and Police Headquarters

Leigh Road

Eastleigh

SO50 9SJ

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 are not happy with how we respond to your complaint, contact the Equality Advisory and Support Service (EASS).

Hampshire and Isle of Wight Integrated Care System 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 exemptions listed below:

The Hampshire and Isle of Wight Integrated Care Board has an obligation to publish documents such as board papers, agendas and technical papers aimed at clinicians and other colleagues working across the health and care system.

This includes many complex documents which often run to hundreds of pages in length. 

We carried out an accessibility audit of the website in October 2023 and discovered some of the existing PDF documents do not meet accessibility standards. 

As part of this process we have now put in place new guidelines for staff creating documents for the website to ensure they meet accessibility standards going forward.  

However, we remain unable to comply with updating all historic versions of these documents. 

The cost to do this would run into thousands of pounds of staff time which our small communications team could not manage whilst ensuring we meet our core duties of communicating with staff and the public. The historic versions of these documents also receive little to no traffic and downloads – for example, our entire archive page gets as few as 10 visitors per month, the majority of which are likely to be our own staff. 

We are also currently not compliant with our board papers. They regularly contain hundreds of pages including scanned images and large reports that have been sourced from multiple departments and external organisations. They are also compiled and uploaded on a tight schedule only hours before they are legally required to be available to the public.

The cost of converting these documents would be significant and is not financially justifiable. Instead, we advise all interested parties to contact hiowicb-hsi.communications@nhs.net to talk through any information that might be required as an alternative.
 

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

Many of the historic PDFs on our website are non-accessible as their titles at upload may have contained acronyms or other language that was not plain English, and many contain tables that cannot be read by assistive technologies like screen readers.

The Hampshire and Isle of Wight Integrated Care Board has an obligation to publish documents such as board papers, agendas and technical papers aimed at clinicians and other colleagues working across the health and care system. This includes many complex documents which often run to hundreds of pages in length. 

We carried out an accessibility audit of the website in October 2023 and discovered some of the existing PDF documents do not meet accessibility standards. As part of this process we have now put in place new guidelines for staff creating documents for the website to ensure they meet accessibility standards going forward. However, we remain unable to comply with updating all historic versions of these documents. 

The cost to do this would run into thousands of pounds of staff time which our small communications team could not manage whilst ensuring we meet our core duties of communicating with staff and the public. The historic versions of these documents also receive little to no traffic and downloads – for example, our entire archive page gets as few as 10 visitors per month, the majority of which are likely to be our own staff. 

We are also currently not compliant with our board papers. They regularly contain hundreds of pages including scanned images and large reports that have been sourced from multiple departments and external organisations. They are also compiled and uploaded on a tight schedule only hours before they are legally required to be available to the public.

The cost of converting these documents would be significant and is not financially justifiable. Instead, we advise all interested parties to contact hiowicb-hsi.communications@nhs.net to talk through any information that might be required as an alternative.

Many of the PDFs on our website do not meet the requirements to be considered fully accessible. The resource and financial cost of making our historic PDF documents and Board Papers compliant with all accessibility standards on the website would be a disproportionate burden on our organisation.

The whole Hampshire and Isle of Wight Integrated Care System is managing unprecedented service demands with budgets under continual pressure. The content for the website is created in-house within the communications team at the current time, with no dedicated web resource.

Hampshire and Isle of Wight Integrated Care Board does not currently benefit from any allocated budget or resource that supports website technical development, coding or any enhancement other than basic hosting services.

A regular 350 page Board Paper would cost approximately £5,705 to be adapted. The annual cost would be in excess of £30k. The annual budget for our entire website is £3,060.00. Under current financial constraints, payment to an external agency to make board papers accessible is not justifiable over other essential service requirements.

All of our users will benefit from us making our website and online information accessible, so focusing our limited resource on maintaining the most-used accessible content on our website and ensuring that new documents are accessible where they are required for essential services or used by people with disabilities is our priority in the interim period.

​​​​​​​We will continue to work with teams to find a viable solution to this issue and update at our next audit in October 2024.

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. Further information about the accessibility of our PDFs is available under the 'non-compliance' and 'disproportionate burden' headings.

Live video

We do not plan to add captions to live video streams because live video is exempt from meeting the accessibility regulations.

This statement was prepared on 30 October 2023. It was last reviewed on 30 October 2023.

This website was last tested on 16 October 2023 by our website developer, Frank Design Ltd, who addressed some issues highlighted in our most recent website audit. The audit of the website was carried out to the WCAG 2.2 AA standard.