Accessibility

Commitment to Accessibility

The Council is committed to making its website as accessible as possible to users with disabilities, including users who may be blind, partially sighted, or have a physical disability. The design of our website includes a number of accessibility features including:

• Resizable text
• Keyboard shortcuts
• Images and alt tags
• Coding standards and use of cascading style sheets

Resizable text

A common design throughout rather than providing text only pages for disabled users, and allowing text sizes to be changed to suit the users needs. We have been careful to make sure that we have not fixed the size of the textual information on the website so that visitors who wish to can alter the font size on the screen to make it easier to read.

There are a number of ways to change the text size in your browser, the easiest way is to follow the following steps:

1. Select the 'View' menu.
2. Select the 'Text Size' option from the menu.
3. Click on the text size you want to view.

1. Select the 'View' menu.
2. Select the 'Increase Font' option from the menu.
3. Click on the text size you want to view.

1. Select the 'View' menu.
2. Select the 'Text Size' option from the menu.
3. Click on the text size you want to view.

It is also possible to increase the size of the text by holding down the ctrl key on the bottom left hand row of the key board whilst using the scroll wheel on the mouse to increase (or decrease) the size of the text.

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Keyboard Shortcuts

Keyboard shortcuts control various browser functions and are often a useful and quick way of navigating through a site.

For the vast majority of browsers, use your Tab key to navigate forward through links (use Shift + Tab to go backwards), and Enter to activate the link.

Many other keys can be used, and will vary depending on the browser and operating system you are using. To find the shortcuts for your browser, follow these steps if your computer is running Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator on Windows:

1. Internet Explorer - Press your F1 key to open the online help and in the index, type "keyboard shortcuts", select the required option and click "display".
2. Netscape Navigator - Press your F1 key to open the online help and in the index, type "keyboard".
3. Firefox -Mozilla - Press your F1 key to open the online help and in the index, select "keyboard Shortcuts".

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Images and alt tags

We have avoided using excessive graphics within the website where possible to ensure quick download times and access to information which cannot be read if in image format.

Where images have been used we have added 'Alt' tags - text alternatives so that you will still know what the image is meant to convey even if it does not load or if you've have chosen to browse with the images switched off or you are using an assistive technology like a screen reader to browse the webpage rather than view.

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Coding standards and the use of Cascading style sheets

This website is built using code compliant with World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards for HTML and Cascading Style Sheets. It conforms to WCAG Accessibility standards. W3C is the governing authority on web development standards and practices. Our website has been designed to be as accessible to as many users as possible, and has been developed using Cascading Style Sheets  

There may be a few pages that do not conform to all the guidelines. Whilst every effort is made to ensure the whole site conforms, with so many contributors, this is an ongoing process.

PDF Documents

This site uses PDF (Adobe Acrobat) file format for the publication of large and complex documents. Please note that Adobe Acrobat documents can be converted back to plain text using Adobe's Web-based conversion service.

Please read our PDF help pages

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