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Accessibility

Accessibility at Rushden Lakes

Rushden Lakes is proud to be AccessAble audited. A copy of our accessibility guide can be viewed online here.

  • Rushden Lakes has 105 blue badge car parking spaces, and 47 accessible bays. Our ‘A’ bays are for any visitor who has a blue badge, any parent/carer and child or for anyone who just needs an extra bit of space!

  • We have step-free access to all stores, and a lift in our Leisure Terrace.

  • Our disabled toilet is located within the Visitor Toilets by The Wildlife Trust Visitor Centre.

  • Visitors can hire a wheelchair or mobility scooter at Customer Services. Please be aware these are given on a first come first serve basis and can only be reserved 1 hour before your visit.

  • We are proud to have achieved the Disabled Parking Accreditation and our certificate is valid until 2025.

We would love to hear your feedback on how we can become more accessible. You can share your feedback and messages by sending an email to customerservices@rushdenlakes.com or calling Customer Services on 01933 427925.

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. 

The Rushden Lakes 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

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 Rushden Lakes. Please let us know if you encounter accessibility barriers:

Compatibility with browsers and assistive technology

Rushden Lakes 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

Rushden Lakes 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 Rushden Lakes 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 Rushden Lakes, 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 for Rushden Lakes:

  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 Rushden Lakes by the following approaches:

  • Self-evaluation