Website accessibility information

Spelthorne Council follows government guidelines and standards to try and make the website easy to use for everyone.

Please refer to the glossary for an explanation of key terms used on this page.

If you have any problems please contact the web team for help.

Access keys
This website uses Access keys, including those used in the UK Government access key system, plus other Access keys to define main areas of the website. Access keys allow a computer user to immediately jump to a specific part of a web page via the keyboard.

Please go to our Access keys page for more information.

Accessibility policy
Spelthorne has developed an accessibility policy which outlines our targets

Getting the most out of your PC set up
Changes can be made to your operating system to make it easier for people to use. The following websites may be useful depending on what system you use:

Microsoft Windows http://www.microsoft.com/enable
Apple Macintosh http://www.apple.com/accessibility
Linux http://larswiki.atrc.utoronto.ca/wiki

Site style
You can change the way Spelthorne’s website looks by selecting one of our predefined styles below. These will display either a full graphical version of the site or text only versions
Standard http://www.spelthorne.gov.uk/accessibility.htm (normal view)
Text only http://www.spelthorne.gov.uk/text/accessibility.htm (no graphics displayed)
Change contrast http://www.spelthorne.gov.uk/contrast/accessibility.htm (for vision- impaired users)

Screen readers

Our website has been designed to use screen readers. We use Browsealoud on the website, which reads web pages out loud.

Accessibility browser options
This gives you the ability to change the appearance of the page and there are further options which may be useful for use with screen reading software.

Microsoft Internet Explorer – Go to Tools/Internet Options/Accessibility and make changes to formatting and user style sheets
Mozilla Firefox – Go to Tools/Options/Advanced and make changes to the accessibility options
Netscape Navigator – Go to Tools/Options/Advanced and make changes to the accessibility options

Accessibility toolbar
The Web Accessibility Toolbar is provided by the Accessible Information Solutions (AIS) team of Vision Australia. Whilst this is primarily used for developers to test web page accessibility, it also contains a range of accessibility functions to automatically change some of the options explained on this page through a toolbar rather than going through the full menus.
Accessibility toolbar

Go to http://www.visionaustralia.org.au/ais/toolbar/

Difficulty using a mouse
If you have difficulty using a mouse, follow these steps to help you find your way around web pages:

Use TAB on your keyboard which will move the cursor to links on the screen
Press ENTER when you get to a link you want
Use page up and page down keys to move the page to an area you want to read

Changing text size
Change the size of text to smaller or larger

Microsoft Internet Explorer – Go to View/text size and select larger/largest or smaller/smallest
Mozilla Firefox – Go to View/Text Size and choose increase or decrease or press the CTRL button on your keyboard and press + or -
Netscape Navigator – Go to View and select increase or decrease

Changing colours
Changing background colour is particularly useful for people who find white uncomfortably glaring.

Microsoft Internet Explorer- Go to Tools/Internet Options/Colours and make changes to text and background colours in the colours panel
Mozilla Firefox – Go to Tools/Options/Content/Colours and make changes to text and background colours in the colours panel
Netscape Navigator – Go to Edit/Preferences/Appearance/Colours.

PDF documents
PDF documents may not be fully accessible to screen readers and vision impaired users. Adobe provide a service to convert PDF documents to plain text or HTML:

http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/access_onlinetools.html

Useful Links