Accessibility Statement — Gardening Barking Area

This Accessibility Statement explains how Gardening Barking and related Barking garden care services aim to make our content and local garden activities accessible to as many people as possible. We recognise that accessible gardening in Barking covers both digital content about our services and the way we plan and support safe, inclusive access to green spaces. Our goal is to meet accepted standards and provide clear information for everyone in the Barking area.

We are committed to achieving and maintaining WCAG 2.1 AA compliance across our digital content, signage, and printed materials that describe Barking gardening services. This includes efforts to provide well-structured pages, meaningful headings, and descriptive link text to help people using assistive technologies. We also aim to ensure that any materials describing our Barking garden care work are presented in plain language and are easy to navigate.

For people using assistive technology, we provide enhanced support for common screen readers and related tools. Our content is tested with popular screen-reader configurations and improved where needed to ensure content order, ARIA landmarks, and semantic markup support useful navigation. We encourage users to report any difficulty so we can further refine accessibility for gardens in Barking and our online resources.

We prioritise keyboard navigation for users who cannot use a mouse. Important interactive elements—such as booking forms for Barking gardening consultations, skip links, and menus—are operable using the keyboard alone. Focus outlines are preserved and clearly visible, and tab order follows a logical sequence so visitors can move through pages and find information about Barking gardening services efficiently.

Our accessibility features include the following key measures:

• WCAG 2.1 AA alignment for contrast, navigation, and content structure.
• Keyboard accessibility for all interactive controls and forms related to Barking garden care.
• Screen-reader support and semantic markup to assist people using assistive technologies.
• Clear headings and lists so information about gardening in Barking is easy to scan.

In addition to technical measures, we use clear imagery and captions where possible, and we provide text equivalents for visual content about Barking gardening projects. We also maintain attention to colour contrast and use accessible typography so printed and digital materials remain legible.

When planning physical access to community green spaces and private garden work in Barking, we consult accessibility best practices. Our approach is to reduce barriers where practical and to provide reasonable adjustments for participants and clients. For events or onsite gardening support, we consider pathways, seating, and sensory considerations to make activities inclusive.

If you encounter any barriers while using our information about Barking gardens or while participating in gardening activities, please tell us about the problem and where it occurred. We keep a process to prioritise fixes and to update materials. We aim to respond to accessibility requests and resolve issues promptly, and we document changes to improve experiences for everyone.

To request accessible formats, to ask about specific accessibility needs related to Gardening Barking or to report an accessibility issue, please contact our accessibility team through the accessible contact channels provided on this site or via the public contact routes we list. We will work with you to provide information or services in a format that meets your needs, and we welcome suggestions to help us improve.