Number 10 Downing Street

The official site of the British Prime Minister's Office

Accessibility

The Prime Minister’s Office is committed to providing a website that is accessible to the widest possible audience – regardless of ability or browsing technology and including those who have visual, hearing, motor and cognitive impairments.

We would like to give control to the user and let them decide how they will view the site. The website offers accessibility options that are easy to discover, understand and select for our visitors.

Web Accessibility Initiative

The site aims to achieve overall compliance with the Web Accessibility Initiative’s (WAI) guidelines, to priority 2 (AA) and aims to conform to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0. 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 – for example, the use of fixed widths means that the page will not scale to a smaller window easily. Rest assured we are committed to achieving a high standard of accessibility and are working hard to address these issues.

If you have any problems accessing any information on the site, please contact the Number 10 Digital Communications Team and we will endeavour to fix the problem or provide the information in an appropriate format. The web team can be emailed at mailto:admin@number10.gov.uk.

Increasing text size

If you find the text on this site is too small, you can change it easily in your browser settings. To do this you should simply adjust your browser’s 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 ‘Text Size’ and the select ‘Increase’.  You can also increase the text size by using the keyboard, pressing ‘Ctrl’ and ‘+’ at the same time.

Alternative text

All images on this site are accompanied by a brief alternative text which describes the image or its function as appropriate. This alternative text (alt-text) is generally visible only when the browser’s automatic image loading feature is turned off

Changing colours

Changing the site’s background colour can be particularly useful for users who rely on magnification technology as white can produce an uncomfortable glare. It is also possible to change the colour of body text on the site.

Both can be achieved by changing preferences in your browser:

If you use Microsoft Internet Explorer, go to the Tools menu, select Internet Options, select Colours and make changes to text and background colours in the Colours panel.

If you use Mozilla Firefox, go to the ‘Tools’ menu, select ‘Options’ and select the ‘Font and Colours’ button.  From here you can over ride the colours used on this site by ticking the boxes marked ‘Always use my: Fonts’ and ‘Always use my: Colors’.  You can also specify which colours you prefer text and links to be displayed in, and which background colour should show on the page. You can also choose colours to be used for links your have previously visited and links when your mouse hovers over them.

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.

PDF files can be read using Adobe Reader software, which is available for many different computer systems including Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Palm. To find out about accessible pdfs visit Access Adobe (new window) . For more help with Acrobat files generally and a link to download Acrobat Reader visit the Adobe site (new window)
Contact us

If you have any questions or comments, please contact the web team at mailto:admin@number10.gov.uk.

Useful links

The following websites will have useful advice and information about web accessibility.