Hi Joe - thanks for your comments.  Can I ask you just to clarify the position of Voice, in that UK Public Bodies need to meet the level WCAG 2.1 AA compliance in terms of accessibility of its website as part of The Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No.2) Accessibility Regulations 2018 which came into force on 23 September 2018.  Is this website itself Compliant?  Is there any guidelines about what we can do to ensure compliance?

Thanks so much.

Adriana

For the Tewin village website, which includes the Parish Council web presence,  (tewinvillage.co.uk) I believe I managed to achieve the needed compliance by using the Bootstrap Standard 3D theme, then adding a custom css to play with some of the colour contrasts. So it is possible using an eVoice site.

Mind you the Parish Council will need to do further work to make the pdfs of agendas, minutes, etc. accessible.

Felicia

Hi Adriana,

I have found some aspects of the site will not pass the basic tests to meet WCAG 2.1. Those features require a significant amount of coding and changes.

I my opinion, I belive Joe has done a great job in providing a service that has helped many parish councils and community groups with a web presence, but in my very personal opinion no longer viable for Councils with the new regualtions and the need for engagement.
We moved to Eyelid Productions when Joe closed the service to Bedfordshire. You can find me on the Stondon PC website and happy to discuss my experiances

Councils also need to work to develop a suitable set of documents to meet these requirements and improve levels of engagement.

James Stirling, Clerk to Stondon Parish Council. 
The above are my personal experiances and not a representation of the Council.

Currently the best official answer I can give is this:

Voice allows you to build a site that is WCAG compliant, but doesn't guarantee it.

(In the same way that a car allows you to obey all the rules of the road but of course cannot guarantee that you do.)

The reason we can't guarantee it is that a lot of WCAG is about how you create your content, which we have no control over. For example how you structure your menus, what text you put into links, or what ALT text you provide for images.

So, you need to be familiar with the aims of WCAG and create your site with that in mind.

For this same reason I don't believe that any website builder guarantees that a site meets all WCAG guidelines.

There are some useful documents about WCAG here.

I realise my answer is a bit vague and probably not what you were looking for. So I'll try to be more specific.

Going forward Voice will aim to ensure that:

1. All Voice themes and applications meet WCAG guidelines. (We will test them for this)
2. Where it is found that a theme or application does not meet guidelines we will make reasonable efforts to fix it.
3. That the system allows your content to be fully WCAG compliant (e.g., they allow you to create ALT text for all images).

Our aim is that public bodies that need to meet WCAG standards can build sites on Voice with confidence and without having to worry excessively about it.

I'll add a more formal statement of this to the main site in due course. There are actually quite a lot of things going on with Voice at the moment, which will gradually become apparent. (I won't spoil the surprise by pre-announcing anything though!)

Oh, and I forgot to mention: Voice is free and always will be.

Thanks

Joe - Voice Admin

Joe, one more quick quesiton - Is Voice Cyber Essentials Certified?

Adriana