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Accessibility

Stonewater.org accessibility statement 

At Stonewater, we’re committed to making our website as accessible as possible to create the best user experience and reduce the barriers often faced by disabled people. 

This statement tells you about the action we’ve taken to improve the accessibility of our website. We are continually working to provide a user-friendly experience across any device you use. 

We welcome your feedback, so if there is something you think we could improve or do differently, please  get in touch. 

This accessibility statement applies to content published on the following domain: 

www.stonewater.org 

This website is managed by Stonewater Ltd, and is designed to be used by as many people as possible.   

 

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Global accessibility standards 

Our website has been built using code that is compliant with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards for HTML and CSS. This means our website should display correctly in current browsers and that any future browsers will also display it correctly. 

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is a global technical standard from W3C, which means websites have met a set of basic goals to make content more accessible to visitors with a disability. 

WCAG sets out four principles of accessibility: perceivable, operable, understandable and robust. Each principle has 12 guidelines and there are three levels of success criteria for meeting them: A, AA, and AAA. 

In accordance with the 'Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018' accessibility regulations; public sector websites or mobile apps are required to meet the international WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standard 

Our Stonewater website has undergone accessibility compliance inspection against the following tools: 

  • Tool 1: Chrome, Lighthouse accessibility tool - rated in the 90s (the metrics score ranges are: 0 to 49 - red/poor, 50 to 89 -orange/needs improvement; 90 to 100 green/good) 

  • Tool 2: AChecker - offers checks against a variety of compliance guidelines, including WCAG 2.0 (Level AA) 

  • Tool 3: validator.w3.org - an html mark-up validator tool 

  • Tool 4: WAVE (web accessibility evaluation tool) 

The Stonewater website has reached level AA. If you would like to know more about what this means, please click on the link or contact us.  

 

Ongoing work to improve accessibility  

Integrated into our website is: 

These integrated websites (and portals, as detailed above) are currently undergoing more rigorous testing to ensure they adhere to accessibility guidelines, as detailed in the section above.  

Stonewater aims to have this work done by March 2024. If you have any questions or would like an update on the progress of this work, please do contact us.  

 

Assistive technology 

Need help reading our website? No problem!  

We’ve added the ReachDeck Toolbar to our site.

If you struggle with reading, have a visual impairment, or prefer to read in your own language, the ReachDeck Toolbar can help. 

Try it out for yourself... 

Click on the orange headphone icon at the bottom left of the website. 

This will launch the ReachDeck Toolbar. You’ll see it docked at the top of your screen. 

Now click on the first ‘pointed finger’ icon on that toolbar and hover your mouse pointer over any text on our site to hear it read out loud. 

How does the ReachDeck Toolbar help? 

The ReachDeck Toolbar will help you to read and translate the content on our website. Its features include: 

  • Text-to-speech: click on or select any text to hear it read aloud. 

  • Translation: translate content into over 100 languages 

  • Text magnification: enlarge text and hear it read out loud. 

  • MP3 generation: convert selected text into an MP3 audio file. 

  • Screen mask: reduce glare with a tinted mask. 

  • Web page simplifier: remove clutter from the screen. Display only the main text. 

  • Picture dictionary: displays pictures related to text selected on the page. 

 

Do you need need support? 

Head over to Texthelp’s dedicated support site to find lots of useful articles on ReachDeck. 

If you are experiencing problems accessing the content on the website, please contact our customer service team at info@stonewater.org.  

 

Downloading documents

Where possible, we provide documents to download in PDF format. 

If you have difficulties reading a PDF, please visit Adobe's Accessibility Resource Centre, which provides useful information for disabled users. 

If you need a document download in a different language or format, please  let us know. We can also arrange for an interpreter so that you can speak to us in your own language. 

Can we help you further? 

Stonewater is constantly looking to improve accessibility to make our website easy for everyone to use. We want to hear from you if you are finding any content difficult to access. Our team is very open to feedback, and we welcome any and all feedback you may have about our website and its accessibility. 

Contact us if you need information in a different format.

In your message, include: 

  • the web address (URL) of the content 

  • your email address and name 

  • the format you need - for example, plain text, braille, BSL, large print or audio CD.
     

Report any other access issues with the website

If you find any problems that are not listed on this page, or you think we’re not meeting the accessibility requirements, contact us using our customer enquiries form here. 

How we tested this website 

Autumn 2023 

We asked Cavendish (a leading communications consultancy) to independently assess the accessibility of our websites – using the latest accessibility compliance tools. They provided a report that detailed any accessibility issues, so that we could make any necessary adjustments and improvements. 

Cavendish will also undertake a full audit of all our integrated domains (as detailed above) and Stonewater will aim to have these individual accessibility statements in place by the end of March 24.  

Preparation of this accessibility statement 

This statement was prepared on 28 November 2023. It was last reviewed on 28 November 2023. 

This website was last tested on 28 November 2023. The test was carried out by Cavendish.