Usability
Web accessibility
Council website
Listen to our website
Text size
Portable Document Format (PDF)
Assistive technology

 

Usability

This website should enable you to find the information you want, either about services you need, or about issues you are interested in. We have organised the information on the site under subject headings that have been tested by consultation; we do not expect you to need to know how or why services are distributed amongst the authority’s various departments.

Accessibility

Websites must by law be accessible, and should meet the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) standards on accessibility. In the same way that we have made changes to our buildings to make them more accessible to people with disabilities, we have made changes to our website.

Council website

The Bolton council website aims to be both accessible and usable to all that need information from it.

Our aim is to provide customers with equal access to information and services. Accessibility has been paramount since the design stage when we asked for feedback from many user groups to make sure we take into account the needs of different people.

We have followed guidance and standards by the Government, and our pages conform to 'A' of the World Wide Web (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative.

Some pages conform to 'AA' and we are continuously carrying out work to make most of our pages 'AA' complaint.

Listen to our website

We have teamed up with Texthelp Systems to provide a service which gives our visitors the chance to listen to bolton.gov.uk. All you have to do is simply install the free Browsealoud software.

Find out more

Text size

You can change the text size via your internet browser by selecting view on the menu of your browser then text size or text zoom (variable on browser used) then select the display size.

Portable Document Format (PDF)

Some documents on our site are available in a PDF format, this helps us to preserve the original format securely in a relatively small file size.

In order to view the document you will need an Adobe Acrobat Reader which is freely available to download:

http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html

To assist with accessibility Adobe has developed a tool to convert PDF documents to read like a normal web page; the link below will take you to the PDF converter.

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

Assistive technology

People who have visual impairments may be interested in the following assistive technology:

• Screen enlargers (or screen magnifiers) work like a magnifying glass. They enlarge a portion of the screen as the user moves the focus—increasing legibility for some users. Some screen enlargers allow a user to zoom in and out on a particular area of the screen.
• Screen readers are software programs that present graphics and text as speech. A screen reader is used to verbalize, or "speak," everything on the screen including names and descriptions of control buttons, menus, text, and punctuation.
• Speech recognition Speech recognition systems, also called voice recognition programs, allow people to give commands and enter data using their voices rather than a mouse or keyboard.
• Speech synthesizers Speech synthesizers (often referred to as text-to-speech (TTS) systems) receive information going to the screen in the form of letters, numbers, and punctuation marks, and then "speak" it out loud. Using speech synthesizers allows blind users to review their input as they type.
• Refreshable braille displays Refreshable braille displays provide tactile output of information represented on the computer screen. The user reads the Braille letters with his or her fingers, and then, after a line is read, refreshes the display to read the next line.
• Braille embossers Braille embossers transfer computer generated text into embossed Braille output. Braille translation programs convert text scanned in or generated.
• Talking word processors Talking word processors are software programs that use speech synthesizers to provide auditory feedback of what is typed.
• Large-print word processors Large-print word processors allow the user to view everything in large text without added screen enlargement.
  To find out more about these technologies and further information, please visit the website of the Royal National Institute for the Blind.