The European Centre for Environment & Human Health 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.

The website has been designed using best practice for web design which is in line with W3C Level AA requirements, and the site’s content is managed in accordance with these guidelines.

Browser Accessibility Options

You can specify the font sizes, styles and colours, and foreground and background colours of web pages displayed on your computer, even if the person creating the web page has already specified these. You can also set the colour you would like to indicate links in web pages.
This could be useful if you have impaired vision or find certain colours or contrasts easier to read.

You can set Internet Explorer to use the fonts and colours of your choice, or to use the Windows ‘default’ colours and fonts.

Open Internet Explorer Web Browser

  1. Open Internet Explorer Web Browser
  2. Select ‘Tools’ from the menu at the top of your window
  3. From the options which appear, select ‘Internet options…’.
  4. Click the ‘General’ tab
  5. Click the button marked ‘Accessibility’
  6. To change the font size, tick the checkbox labelled ‘Ignore font sizes specified on Web pages’
  7. To remove background and font colours, tick the checkbox labelled ‘Ignore colours specified on web pages’
  8. Click OK (and again if necessary)
  9. Select ‘View’ from the menu at the top of the window
  10. Select ‘Text Size’
  11. Select desired text size

Microsoft Internet Explorer for Apple Mac

  1. Open Internet Explorer Web Browser.
  2. Select the “edit” menu at the top of the window.
  3. From the options menu which appears, select “preferences”.
  4. Click “web content”
  5. Deselect the button labelled “show style sheets”
  6. Return to the list of preferences
  7. Click on “web browser”
  8. Select “language/fonts”
  9. Select the font size you require

Instructions for users of Netscape Navigator Text:

  1. Select ‘Edit’ from the menu at the top of the window and choose ‘Preferences’
  2. Open the Appearance group and click on ‘Fonts’ category
  3. Next to ‘For the encoding’ should read Western to tell the computer which types of letters and symbols to use. Select 18 from ‘size’
  4. Next to the Variable Width Font field there is a drop down box – select ‘Arial’. The Fixed Width Font box should read ‘Courier New’ – select 18 from ‘size’
  5. To override the fonts used by the web page author, select ‘use my default fonts overriding document specified fonts’
  6. Click on ‘OK’

Colours:

  1. Select ‘Edit’ from the menu at the top of the window and choose ‘Preferences’.
  2. Open the Appearance group and click on the ‘Colours’ category.
  3. Select a colour button to change the colours of text, background, unvisited links, or visited links
  4. To override the colours used by the web page author, select ‘Always use my colours, overriding document’
  5. Click on ‘OK’

 

Downloadable documents

A number of downloadable documents available within this site are in Portable Document Format (often referred to as PDF). In order to view a PDF document, you need free software called Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Adobe Acrobat Reader can be downloaded from the Adobe web site by following the link below:

If you use a screen reading program which synthesizes text as audible speech you may experience difficulty reading PDF files. The Access Adobe web site provides online tools to convert PDF documents into standard HTML or ASCII text. The site can be visited via the link below: