Accessibility - Rural Arts

How accessible is The Courthouse?

We have invested in significant improvements to our Grade II listed home to make it as accessible as possible.

This includes

Blue Badge Parking on site
Step free access in, out and around the building
A lift to our first floor
A ‘Changing Place’ accessible bathroom on the ground floor
A large accessible bathroom on the first floor
A Hearing Loop in The Courthouse
Staff with Dementia Friends training
A ‘Quiet Space’ available during workshops, performances and screenings

If you require Blue Badge parking, this must be booked in advance. Please email admin@ruralarts.org or call 01845 526 536 on the day.

We’re always working to become more accessible. If you have any suggestions or would like to let us know about any access requirements, please email admin@ruralarts.org or call 01845 526 536.

For more information about visiting The Courthouse, please click here.

About the website

This website is run by Rural Arts. We want as many people as possible to be able to use this website. For example, that means you should be able to:

zoom in up to 300% without the text spilling off the screen
navigate most of the website using just a keyboard
navigate most of the website using speech recognition software
listen to most of the website using a screen reader (including the most recent versions of JAWS, NVDA and VoiceOver)

We’ve also made the website text as simple as possible to understand.

AbilityNet has advice on making your device easier to use if you have a disability.

How accessible this website is

We know some parts of this website are not fully accessible:

you cannot modify the line height or spacing of text
most older PDF documents are not fully accessible to screen reader software

What to do if you cannot access parts of this website

If you need information on this website in a different format like accessible PDF, large print, easy read, audio recording or braille:

call 01845 526536

We’ll consider your request and get back to you in seven days.

Reporting accessibility problems with this website

We’re always looking to improve the accessibility of this website. If you find any problems not listed on this page or think we’re not meeting accessibility requirements, contact: 01845 526536

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).

Technical information about this website’s accessibility

Rural Arts 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 non-compliances listed below.

Non compliance with the accessibility regulations

Some images do not have a text alternative, so people using a screen reader cannot access the information. This fails WCAG 2.1 success criterion 1.1.1 (non-text content).

We plan to add text alternatives for all images by December 2021. When we publish new content we’ll make sure our use of images meets accessibility standards.

Content that’s not within the scope of the accessibility regulations

PDFs and other documents

Many of our older PDFs and Word documents do not meet accessibility standards – for example, they may not be structured so they’re accessible to a screen reader. This does not meet WCAG 2.1 success criterion 4.1.2 (name, role value).

Some of our PDFs and Word documents are essential to providing our services. For example, we have PDFs with information on how users can access our services, and forms published as Word documents. By September 2020, we plan to either fix these or replace them with accessible HTML pages.

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.

Any new PDFs or Word documents we publish will meet accessibility standards.