Important information:

Phone lines open between 10am - 4pm

Our telephone lines are only open from 10am until 4pm and are extremely busy. Why not instead try our new virtual assistant who can answer many queries, or else email pensions@shropshire.gov.uk Many thanks for your patience.

Accessibility statement

This website is run by the Shropshire County Pension Fund. We want as many people as possible to be able to use this website. For example, that means you should be able to:

  • Change colours, contrast levels and fonts
  • Zoom in up to 200% 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:

  • Most older PDF documents are not fully accessible to screen reader software
  • Please see 'content that’s not within the scope of the accessibility regulations'. 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
  • When using the digital assistant chatbot, people who use a keyboard or assistive technologies are not able to quickly navigate through the chatbots conversation in order to reach new replies

Feedback and contact information

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

We’ll consider your request and get back to you in 3 working 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, think we're not meeting accessibility requirements or have any feedback, please email web.manager@shropshire.gov.uk.

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

Shropshire County Pension Fund is committed to making its website accessible, in accordance with the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018.

Please note that the Shropshire County Pension Fund website uses Microsoft’s bot-framework in order to create the digital assistant chatbot. Microsoft is also always working to improve the accessibility of their products. You can view the Bot-framework-Webchat accessibility document on Github.

Compliance status

This website is partially compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1 AA standard, due to the non-compliances listed below.

Non accessible content

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

Non compliance with the accessibility regulations

The "My pension online" service has the following issues:

  • Empty heading in page structure (WCAG 2.1 success criterion 1.3.1 & 2.4.6)
  • Text colour does not always meet appropriate contrast levels (WCAG 2.1 success criterion 1.4.3)
  • Some links do not have a visible focus style (WCAG 2.1 success criterion 2.4.7)

This is a system provided by a third party, and 'skinned' to look like the rest of our website. We will be discussing these issues with the supplier with a view to resolve them as soon as possible.

The 'digital assistant' chatbot has the following issues:

  • When using the chatbot, the focus does not immediately go to the newest reply when selecting the ‘5 most common questions’ buttons, causing users on a keyboard or assistive technologies to manually navigate to the bottom of the chat bot. This does not follow a logical reading order. Due to this, it fails the WCAG 2.1 success criterion 1.3.2 (meaningful sequence) and 3.2.2 (on input).

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

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.

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.

Disproportionate burden

Some of our PDF documents on our website are provided by a third-party or are historical documents created by us before 23 September 2018 which are not essential to providing our service at this time. We’ve assessed the cost of fixing the issues with documents that we do not hold the originals to, or believe that updating/ recreating them would be a disproportionate burden within the meaning of the accessibility regulations. 

Preparation of this accessibility statement

This statement was last reviewed on 24 April 2023.