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Accessibility

Accessibility at our retail and shopping parks

We want everyone to enjoy a great day out at Aintree Shopping Park without difficulty. That’s why we pledge to meet the needs of all our guests.

We understand that for persons with a disability, and all those with accessibility requirements, visiting somewhere for the first time can be a daunting prospect.

That’s why our retail and shopping centres are proud to be AccessAble audited. AccessAble are the UK’s most trusted and popular source of accessibility information covering everything you need to be aware of prior to visiting.

Accessibility on this website

Measures to support accessibility

The Crown Estate is committed to providing a website that is accessible to the widest possible audience. We actively work to ensure that this website is accessible and usable by people of all abilities.

Measures to support accessibility:

  • Include accessibility within our purpose and values

  • Accessibility is considered throughout our internal policies

  • Integrate accessibility into our procurement practices

  • Provide accessibility training for our staff

  • Assign clear accessibility goals and responsibilities

Conformance status

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) defines requirements for designers and developers to improve accessibility for people with disabilities. It defines three levels of conformance: Level A, Level AA, and Level AAA. 

This website is partially conformant with WCAG 2.1 Level AA.

‘Partially conformant’ means that some parts of the content do not fully conform to the accessibility standard.

Additional accessibility considerations

Show more focus states for managing agents page - this helps the visitor when new content is loaded, it will focus on the first new item instead of keeping the focus on the show more button. This will allow the visitor to keep track of the items displayed on the page.

Skip links - The first elements a keyboard user should be able to focus on the page are links to the main landmarks on the page (the navigation, the main content, and the footer). This enables the visitor to jump to these landmarks without having to unnecessarily tab through elements.

Mega nav - Applied good keyboard navigation support to the main navigation on the site, allowing a keyboard operator to easily open and close the mega nav menu of the main navigation while maintaining the correct focus state.

Horizontal scroll - For desktop visitors we have enabled the ability to drag and scroll instead of forcing the visitor to use the scroll bar. This will give the visitor a larger area to interact with instead of using their mouse to click on a smaller scroll bar.

Feedback

We welcome your feedback on the accessibility of this website. Please let us know if you encounter accessibility barriers:

Compatibility with browsers and assistive technology

This website is designed to be compatible with the following assistive technologies:

  • Keyboard only navigation on Chrome, Firefox, Edge - Windows 10 and Safari - MacOSVentura

  • Safari with VoiceOver on MacOS Ventura 13.1

  • Chrome with NVDA on Windows 10

This website is not compatible with:

  • We do not support Microsoft Internet Explorer browsers

  • We do not support browsers older than 1 major version

  • We do not support mobile operating systems older than 2 major versions

Technical specifications

Accessibility of this website relies on the following technologies to work with a combination of web browser and any assistive technologies or plugins installed on a visitor’s computer:

  • HTML

  • WAI-ARIA

  • CSS

  • JavaScript

These technologies are relied upon for conformance with the accessibility standards used.

Limitations and alternatives

Despite our best efforts to ensure accessibility of this website, there may be some limitations.

Below is a description of known limitations, and potential solutions. Please contact us if you observe an issue not listed below.

Known limitations:

  1. Images: Uploaded images may not have text alternatives because this has been missed out when images have been uploaded. We are educating our content editors on uploading alt text when adding in images. Please report to the email provided and we will update the image alt text.

  2. Heading hierarchy: Headings not being in the correct order because content has been updated incorrectly. We are educating our content editors to respect the hierarchy of headings. Please report to the email provided and we will update the headings.

  3. Links names: The description of the links not being descriptive to people using screen readers because content has not been added correctly. We are educating our content editors to have more descriptive link names. Please report to the email provided and we will update the affected links.

  4. Cookie banner: The cookie consent banner we use on the site may have multiple accessibility issues and could cause it to be difficult to use, this is due to the banner being provided by a third-party service and we are unable to modify it. We will raise the accessibility concerns with the provider to see if they are able to help resolve accessibility issues. Please send feedback to the email provided and we will raise this with the 3rd party vendor.

  5. Third party videos (e.g., YouTube): Some videos may not have transcripts or captions, or the captions they do have may be automatically generated by the provider. This may result in some captions being inaccurate because when providers, such as YouTube, auto-generate captions, it doesn’t always get things exactly right, and this may change the meaning of certain phrases. We will be reviewing all auto-generated content to ensure it is up to a high standard. Please use the support email provided if you encounter an issue with the videos and we can try and provide the content in a format that may be more suitable for you.

  6. Non-accessible documents: non-HTML documents available to download from our site (e.g., case study PDFs), so these may not be accessible to screen readers because visitors will be using 3rd party programs to access these documents. We will monitor comments on this and look at alternative ways of accessing this information. Please send feedback to the email provided and we will review the issue.

Assessment approach

The Crown Estate assessed the accessibility of this website by the following approaches:

  • Self-evaluation