Colchester Borough Council aims to make this website accessible to all visitors, ensuring it meets the needs of disabled users, and is viewable in the widest possible range of web-browsing technology. To achieve this goal, the Colchester Borough Council website was created in accordance with certain web standards and government guidelines.

The Council's equality impact assessment on the website can be viewed here.

Access keys

Access keys can make it easier for a visitor to navigate through a website. A link is instantly selected when its access key is typed.

On a Windows computer, you can press ALT + an access key to select a link.
On a Macintosh, you can press Control + an access key to select a link.

Conforming to the UK Government accesskeys standard, the following access keys are defined on each page of the Colchester Borough Council website:

• S - Skip navigation
• 1 - Home page
• 3 - Site map
• 4 - Search
• 9 - Contact
• 0 - Access key details

Standards compliance

1. All pages on this site marked with the W3C-WAI Level Double-A conformance icon comply with all priority 1 and 2 guidelines of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (WCAG 1.0). As many of the guidelines can not be tested automatically, this statement is made on the basis of subjective manual review. After evaluating the site against the priority 1 and 2 guidelines, it is believed that all marked pages adhere to them. A checklist of the WCAG guidelines is available here.

2. All pages on this site marked with the Bobby AA icon comply with the Bobby AA accessibility guidelines. Understanding that many accessibility features can be measured, but many can not, this statement is made on the basis of both an automatic scan and subjective manual review. After evaluating the site against Bobby's AA guidelines, it is believed that all marked pages adhere to them.

3. All pages on this site validate as HTML 4.01 Transitional, as determined by the W3C Markup Validation Service. This is important to ensure that the website has a consistant appearance and functionality across all modern web browsers.

4. All pages on this site use valid Cascading Stylesheets (CSS), as determined by the W3C CSS Validation Service. This is important to ensure that the website has a consistant appearance across all modern web browsers.

Browsealoud

The Colchester Borough Council website is Browsealoud enabled. By dowloading an installing a small plugin from Browsealoud, you can have information on this site read aloud to you. Click here to visit the Browsealoud website.

Increasing text size

The Colchester Borough Council website uses relative font sizes to allow text to be resized gracefully. See the table below for a guide to increasing the text size in some popular web browsers:

Increasing text size in popular web browsers

Internet Explorer
Netscape or Mozilla Firefox
Opera (Unlike the other browsers, this does not just increase text size. Instead it magnifies the whole page, including images)