Accessibility

What we've done

This site has been built with accessibility in mind. In particular:

• You can navigate the whole site by keyboard, with a clearly visible focus outline and a “skip to content” link as the first thing you reach.
• It works with screen readers: proper landmark regions, a logical heading order, labelled form fields and described controls. Images that are purely decorative are hidden so they don't add noise.
• Colour contrast is kept comfortably above the AA minimum, and in many places well beyond it.
• It honours your “reduce motion” setting: if your device is set to limit movement, the animations switch off.
• There are no cookies, no trackers and no third-party scripts, so there are no consent pop-ups to clear and nothing following you from page to page. The accessibility is built into the site itself, not bolted on with an overlay tool.
• It reflows for mobile, tablet and desktop, and stays usable when you zoom in or make the text larger.
• Nothing flashes, and nothing autoplays, no video, audio or sliding carousels. The one animation, the breathing guide in our self-help tools, only runs when you start it, stops the moment you want, and never puts you under any time pressure.

The standard we aim for

We aim to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 at level AA. As a community interest company we aren't legally required to meet the regulations that bind public sector websites, but we've chosen to hold this site to that same standard. Accessibility is ongoing, and we keep working at it.

Known limitations

We're not aware of any significant problems, but no site is perfect, and this reflects our own testing rather than a formal independent audit. If you come across something that's hard to use, please tell us and we'll do our best to put it right or get you the information another way.

Visiting us in person

Website accessibility is separate from getting into the building, so here's the picture for our Wigan centre: there is a single step at the entrance, and most of our therapy rooms are upstairs. We do have a ground-floor room where sessions can take place, so if the step or the stairs would be a barrier for you, tell us when you get in touch and we'll arrange your sessions there. If you'd like to talk anything else through, such as access needs we haven't thought of, please give us a call.

Tell us about a problem

If anything on this site is difficult to use, contact us at empathynorthwest@outlook.com or on 0303 303 1333. This statement was last reviewed on 16 July 2026.