Accessibility

Accessibility statement

The Home Office is committed to providing a website that is accessible to the widest possible audience regardless of ability.

The Internet has helped to change the way people work and communicate. We would like to give control to the user and let them decide how they will view the site. The site aims to achieve overall compliance with the Web Accessibility Initiative's (WAI) guidelines.

Web accessibility initiative

This website endeavours to conform to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0. The Accessibility 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 some content may not yet reach the standards in all areas.

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

W3C validation service

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. The site displays correctly with recent versions of the most popular browsers, and using standard XHTML code means that any future browsers should also display this website correctly. If you have a problem viewing any part of this website in your browser, please e-mail the accessibility team.

Increasing text size

If you find the text on this site is too small, you can change it easily in your browser settings.

If you use Microsoft Internet Explorer, go to the View menu, select Text Size and then either Larger or Largest.

If you use Mozilla Firefox, go to the View menu, select Zoom and then either Zoom in or Zoom out.

Changing the colour of the background

It is possible to change the background colour, using Firefox web browser. (Click on 'Tools', then 'Options', select the 'Content' tab, then select the preferred colour). Remove the tick from the box which says 'allow pages to choose their own colour'.

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.

Further help required to use the site:

The BBC resource 'My Web My Way', is recommended as a useful website which has been specifically designed to help users on a wide variety of platforms.

Alternatively, if you are experiencing difficulties using the site and require any technical advice, please contact our Accessibility Team who will provide further guidance: Amanda.Diggens@homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk.