Accessibility Statement

We believe in access to information over the Internet for all.

This Accessibility Statement provides an overview of the accessibility features we have implemented on this website.

If you have any questions regarding the accessibility of these sites, please contact us.

We are committed to making our website as accessible as possible for all our website visitors, including those with disabilities.

We try to adhere to the most stringent standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium, which is an international group responsible for setting standards for web technologies. The Consortium has set up a specialist task group, the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), to define standards on web accessibility for disabled users.

The WAI produces varying levels of standards and grades them in order of importance. Organisations can use these grades to decide what level of accessibility to aim for. At Visit County Durham we aim to stick to all of the WAI's standards.

The standards are designed to ensure that all users can access the content on our website, including:

Blind users
Partially sighted and colour-blind users
Deaf users
Hearing-impaired users
Users with limited mobility
Users with cognitive disabilities or learning difficulties
Users with photo-sensitive epilepsy.
Each page on thisisdurham.com is regularly checked for compliance using Bobby from Watchfire. Bobby is a leading accessibility tool, which performs more than 90 accessibility checks on each page, measuring readability by screen readers, text equivalents for images, audio and video, colour dependency, and keyboard support.

How This Benefits Visitors
To illustrate how compliancy has made this site accessible, we have listed representative disabilities below and explained how this site meets the users' needs.

Visual (Impaired)
Those with visual impairments (e.g. myopia) can scale on all pages on the site to suit their own requirement. All text on pages is scaled, including all menu item.

Hearing
There is no content on this site that cannot be accessed by deaf or hard of hearing people. To put this into context:
If we were to include audio clips we would also provide a text version of the soundtrack.
If we were to include movie clips or video streaming we would also provide time-indexed subtitles.

Speech
This site may be fully accessed using any voice-controlled computer and web browser. This website is also speech enabled with Browsealoud.

Cognitive
The layout of this site is uniform on all pages. The main (vertical) menu is structured identically on all pages (i.e. any page can be accessed from anywhere in the site). Additionally, section or page navigation is always included in the panel to the top of each page.

Neurological
There are no animated images or flashing text on this site which could - in extreme cases - cause difficulty for people who have particular neurological disorders.

Features for the Visually Impaired
Visit County Durham incorporates several features to support blind and poor-sighted people.

Text Scaling
Content text on this site is specified in percentage terms, meaning that its size can be increased inside the browser window for easier viewing. The ability to support text scaling varies from browser to browser, but given below are some guidelines for the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera.

In Internet Explorer, select the View | Text Size menu command. You can then choose from a range of text sizes (Largest, Larger, Medium (default), Smaller and Smallest). Note that Internet Explorer cannot resize images.

In Firefox, select the View | Zoom menu command. You then be able to Zomm in or Zoom Out, you also have the option to Zoom Text Only.

In Opera, select the View | Zoom menu command. You then have range of percentages to choose from. Opera scales everything on the page, not just text, so images will also increase in size as you increase the zoom factor.

Even the same browser product can behave differently on different platforms. For example, Internet Explorer on the Mac will scale images, whereas the Windows version cannot. Check with your supplier for details.

Give Us Your Feedback
We are committed to providing an accessible service at Visit County Durham. If you experience problems or have any suggestions for improvement, please email us at info@visitcountydurham.org.