Home Our services About us Work for us Emergency Accessibility This page explains how we ensure our websites are usable and accessible. This page explains how we ensure our NHS website and service sites are usable and accessible to all users. This applies to: Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust Beside You Clover Street Discovery Orthotics East Sussex School Health and CITES Kent Youth Health New Street Dental Practice Quality Improvement. We want to ensure that we make reasonable adjustments to enable our patients and service users to receive information in formats that they can understand and appropriate support to help them communicate. It is our duty under the Equality Act 2010. Contents Using the ReachDeck toolbar for language translation, audio or text magnification Accessibility statement Contacting us by phone or visiting us in person Non accessible content What we're doing to improve accessibility Glossary If you are a patient or service user who needs support at your appointments, please tell a member of staff what you need or ask someone to request this on your behalf. It is important to us that our website is easy to use and can be understood by people visiting the site. ReachDeck toolbar We have digital inclusion software from TextHelp, called ReachDeck, on our website. This makes our content more accessible with reading and translation support*. This service is free for site users. * The language translation service should only be used to translate general information on our website. As this is a Google translation tool, it is not intended to replace human or traditional translation methods. To ensure patient safety please continue to use our service providers to translate information relating to personal treatment and care. Click on the orange ReachDeck icon (normally located bottom right) on your screen to launch the support toolbar. Then click on any text to hear it read out loud. ReachDeck offers reading and translation support – helping you to access and understand our website better. All the features are accessed from an easy-to-use, floating toolbar; allowing you to drag and drop it anywhere on screen. What the icons do in order of left to right: Text to speech - click on or select any text to hear it read aloud. Play - begin reading the page aloud or speack the current selection. Stop - stops the speech playback. Translation - translate the page to a selected language. Picture - select text on the page and click this button for a picture definition. Audio - select text on he page and click this button to generate and download a mp3 (audio) file. Screen mask - blocks distractions on screen with a tinted mask. Magnify - enlarges text and reads it out loud. Simplify - removes clutter from the screen, displaying only main text. Help - gives explainations to what each icon does. Settings - customise options to suit individual needs or preferences, such as speech speed, text size and colour theme. Watch TextHelp’s how to guide Please note, Browsealoud is the previous name for ReachDeck. Accessibility statement for Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust This website and our service sites are run by Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust. We want as many people as possible to be able to use these websites. For example, that means you should be able to: use our ReachDeck toolbar to: text to speech language translation text magnification mp3 generation screen mask web page simplifier 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. We’ve also made the website text as simple as possible to understand. We’re committed to using plain English on our website to make the information easy to understand. If you find information on our site that you think should be clearer, please tell us by emailing kchft.comms@nhs.net. We will need to know the details of the page your were looking at; information you thought should be clearer and anything else you think would help us to improve this. How accessible our websites are We know some parts of websites aren’t fully accessible: most older PDF documents aren’t fully accessible to screen reader software some videos don’t have captions you can’t modify the line height or spacing of text some of our online forms are difficult to navigate using just a keyboard. What to do if you can’t access parts of our websites If you need information on our websites in a different format like accessible PDF, large print, easy read, audio recording or braille: 0800 030 4550 kentchft.PALS@nhs.net We’ll consider your request and get back to you within 14 days. Reporting accessibility problems with our websites We’re always looking to improve the accessibility of our websites. If you find any problems that aren’t listed on this page or think we’re not meeting accessibility requirements, contact our Communications Team at kchft.comms@nhs.net. 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). Contacting us by phone or visiting us in person If you contact the relevant service before your visit we can arrange a British Sign Language (BSL) interpreter and/or arrange appropriate accessibility needs. For help or more details please speak to our Patient Advice and Liaison Service (PALS): 0800 030 4550 Text 07899 903499 kentchft.PALS@nhs.net Non accessible content The content listed below is non-accessible for the following reasons. Non compliance with the accessibility regulations Text contrast In some parts of our websites the text contrast might be hard to read. This doesn’t meet WCAG 2.1 success criterion 1.4.3 contrast (minimum). Colour contrast is the ratio of the foreground colour (text) and the background colour. Text should have a ratio of 4.5:1 or greater with the background. We don't plan to fix these instances as this text is used for visual purposes or designs across the websites and aren't essential to using or reading them. Unordered list Some of our lists may appear unordered. These are either ordered alphabetically or in an order we feel is most important to the user. External videos (missing captions) Some embedded videos that are from external websites may not have captions. Issues with PDFs and other documents Many of our older PDFs and Word documents don’t meet accessibility standards - for example, they may not be structured so they’re accessible to a screen reader. This doesn’t meet WCAG 2.1 success criterion 4.1.2. Where these are no longer being updated, we do not intend to recreate them in accessible versions as this would be a disproportionate burden. The accessibility regulations don’t require us to fix PDFs or other documents published before 23 September 2018 if they’re not essential to providing our services. We do not generally add new PDFs to our site. There are some exceptions: we add some PDFs as downloads of reports or publications our annual reports and other reports, which must, by law, be laid before parliament in a printed version, and then appear unaltered downloads intended for print purposes, such as posters. We also have a number of forms in Microsoft Word format, which are not accessible. Please contact the relevant service if you need help. We try to make sure that PDF documents on our website are as accessible as possible. If you are having problems accessing a particular document, please let us know at kchft.comms@nhs.net. Is there anything I can do to make PDF documents more accessible? Useful information about ways to make Acrobat documents more accessible is provided on Adobe’s website. Further information can be found on Adobe pages on accessibility. What we’re doing to improve accessibility Testing We worked with our third party developers, who have produced detailed accessibility reports for each of our websites. These reports were produced in November 2020. We have tried to make sure our websites are accessible for all users and have listed above any non accessible content. Glossary We have put together a glossary to improve our information and explain difficult or long words on our website. It is aimed at supporting and involving people who have a learning disability or difficulty, speak limited English or who have a low literacy level. View glossary This glossary is designed to engage and empower people to make choices and understand more about us and the services we provide. Our aim is to make sure that reasonable adjustments are made to our information to make it more accessible for people in the community who have a learning disability. We value your feedback, so if you have any comments about or suggestions for the glossary, please do let us know by calling 0300 123 1807 or emailing kcht.cct@nhs.net. Last updated This statement was last updated on 6 October 2021. Patients and public Accessibility Freedom of information Leaflet library Members Patient Advice and Liaison Service (PALS) Privacy Your feedback The trust Board Members Governors Jobs Magazine News Training Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust CQC rating Outstanding 24 July 2019 See full report FacebookTwitterLinkedInYouTubeVimeo © Crown copyright. Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust. All content is available under the Open Government Licence v3.0, except where otherwise stated. Website developed in partnership with Kayo Digital By clicking “Accept cookies”, you agree to the storing of cookies on your device to enhance site navigation, analyze site usage, and assist in our marketing efforts. Privacy policy Cookies settings Accept cookies