Accessibility statement

We are working to make England’s Community Forest website as accessible as possible for visitors regardless of their ability, disability or general awareness of using the internet.

When trying to make a fully inclusive website there is no single solution to meet the needs of all users – and sometimes trying to improve the site for one particular disability can have an effect on our ability to meet the needs of another section of our audience.

We aim to achieve all World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Version 2.0 ‘Double A’ standard as a minimum on our website, however sometimes this might not be possible on some pages.

We also try as much as possible to allow you to ‘optimise your user experience’. This allows you to view and use England’s Community Forests website the way you want to – not the way we make you.

Useful resources

The following websites provide further accessibility information for your web browser.

BBC Accessibility Help

Accessibility GOV.UK

Help with downloads

This website sometimes uses files that your computer may need an extra programme, or piece of software, to open. In most cases this software, such as Adobe Reader, is already supplied with new computers. We only use document formats that can be opened using a free reader that you can download by following the links on this page.

Adobe Acrobat Reader

Many of the files held on this website are in Adobe PDF format, which means you’ll need special software to view them. This software is available to download free of charge from this page.

The Adobe Acrobat Reader allows you to view, navigate, and print PDF files across all major computing platforms. PDF stands for Portable Document Format and means a document that can be viewed or printed out on any platform, whether Windows, Macintosh or Linux.

To download Adobe Acrobat Reader, visit the Adobe Acrobat website.

PDF files and accessibility

We try to ensure that the information in the PDF content is made accessible to all our users by enriching it with PDF tags. This means the PDF documents can be easily read by screen readers. However, in rare cases it is impossible to make PDF documents as accessible as we would like, for example in the case of PDF’s containing maps and other diagrams.

Image based PDF Documents

Where PDF documents are imaged based, for example maps, it is impossible to make the document fully accessible. In those instances we will try as best we can to offer an alternative solution, although this may not always be possible.

Help with hearing the website

ReadSpeaker ProReader is a web service that reads the text content on a website out aloud.

On the Settings page you can choose how you want it to work. You can have the text that is read displayed in the window, select text size, colour and make other changes on how the text is shown.

It is also possible to make ProReader highlight the text as it reads on a word by word basis, sentence by sentence basis or both. Support for JavaScript must be switched on for the highlighting function to work.