Website accessibility

We are committed to providing a website that is accessible to as many people as possible - regardless of their ability or browsing technology and including those who have visual, hearing, motor and cognitive impairments.

We would like to give you control and let you decide how you want use the site. We try to offer accessibility options that are easy to discover, understand and select.

We aim to achieve overall compliance with the Web Accessibility Initiative's (WAI) guidelines.

Web Accessibility Initiative

We try  to conform to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0. These Guidelines explain how to make Web content accessible to people with disabilities. Conformance to these Guidelines helps to make the Web more accessible to users with disabilities and benefits all users.

There may be some pages that do not conform to all the guidelines. Whilst every effort is made to ensure the whole site conforms, this is an ongoing process and older content may not yet reach the standards in all areas.

If you have any problems accessing any information on the site, please contact us and we will endeavour to fix the problem or provide the information in an appropriate format.

This website is built using code compliant with World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards for XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets.

W3C is the governing authority on web development standards and practices.

Changing the text size or colours of websites

Almost all modern browsers let you change the way web pages are displayed. If you need to change the text size or colour, or the colour of the background, the BBC have a very good 'How to guides' for making the web easier to use

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Images

All content images used in this site include descriptive ALT attributes. Those in purely decorative graphics or used for layout include null ALT attributes. An ALT attribute is the text you see when you hover your mouse pointer over an image or the text that is displayed when images are turned off in your browser.

Visual design

This site uses cascading style sheets (CSS) for visual layout.

If your browser or browsing device does not support stylesheets at all, the content of each page is still readable.

Access keys

We try to avoid using access keys on our site as these can override screen readers shortcuts.

Plain English

The language used on the site will, where possible, be concise, easy to understand and free from jargon, abbreviations and technical terms.

Information in other languages

Although this website is mainly written in English, we provide some basic information in the borough's main community languages. Where appropriate we can translate information on this website or provide an interpreter. For further information please contact us

Audio downloads

In some circumstances we provide mp3 audio files for download from this website. To listen to them you will need a media player, such as Windows Media Player or Quicktime. Where possible, we will provide a text transcription of the audio file. The recordings for download may be podcast programmes or interviews broadcast on the local community radio station. Where this is the case much of the information discussed is already available on this website so we will not always provide a full transcription.