Accessibility

Forms

General Enquiry

Accessibility Statement

Epsom & Ewell Borough Council is committed to making its websites accessible, in accordance with the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018.

This accessibility statement applies to www.epsom-ewell.gov.uk.

Compliance status

This website is partially compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.2 AA standard, due to the non-compliance listed below.

Non-accessible content

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

Non-compliance with the accessibility regulations

Our main navigation menu is not fully compliant with the accessibility regulations.

The menu includes a “dropdown” function when viewed on a desktop, which makes the menu appear over the page body when the mouse is hovering over the menu. There is no way to dismiss the dropdown menu without moving the mouse pointer away from the menu. The same happens when the menu is displayed via keyboard action - keyboard focus must be moved away to dismiss the menu.

This can cause the menu to appear over the body text, with no way to dismiss it except for changing hover or focus. This is non-compliant under WCAG 1.4.13 Content on Hover or Focus.

We are working with our website supplier on possible solutions to this problem. We will update this statement once we have more information.

Disproportionate burden

Historic documents published under our e-government platform (located at https://democracy.epsom-ewell.gov.uk) are not fully compliant with the accessibility regulations. This includes PDF copies of minutes of committee meetings, agenda packs, and similar documents. This only affects documents published before 29 September 2026.

There are two areas in which these historic documents are non-compliant:

  • The list of attendees and absentees at the start of the minutes is presented as a table, with the cells containing the words “present” and “absent” being visually styled as table headers. However, the tables do not contain heading tags. So these cells will be identified as table data, rather than table headings. This is non-compliant under WCAG 1.3.1 Info and Relationships
  • Some PDF documents are missing a document title. This does not affect all PDFs on our e-government platform; some of them have a title applied. But some documents are lacking the title, and are non-compliant under WCAG 2.4.2 Page titled.

We determine that it would be an unreasonable burden on us to fix these issues on historical documents published before 29 September 2026. In making this decision we considered the following:

  • We cannot modify these PDF documents “in place”. They have been generated by our e-government platform and are static
  • We have made changes to our templates, and future documents do not have these issues. To fix historic documents, we would have to remove all published PDF documents from our site, and re-publish them using the new templates
  • These documents stand as a historical record of council activity and decisions made by councillors. There is a substantial legal and historical risk to information in these documents being altered by mistake if changes are made to them
  • There would be a significant financial burden to undertaking these changes. Every document would need to be manually checked to ensure the historical record remains unaffected by any changes to these documents
  • Most of the content in these documents is accessible. Making these changes would not significantly improve the documents for people with disabilities, and would be out of proportion with the costs and legal risks.

Preparation of this accessibility statement

This statement was prepared on 7 October 2026.

We used a combination of scanning tools and manual checks to prepare this statement.

The statement was last reviewed on 7 October 2026.

Feedback and contact information

If you are unhappy with the accessibility of our site, or you want to request further information about anything in this statement, please contact us using our form located at the top of this page.

The accessibility of our site is the joint responsibility of our ICT and Communications teams, and we will work together to review and respond to any feedback we receive.

Enforcement procedure

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).