Navigating around the site

Wherever you are in the site, you can click the Oxfordshire County Council logo in the top left hand corner to get back to the homepage.

On every page, you'll also see a "Main menu" link. Click this to see an overview of all the information on this site.

As you navigate through the site, you'll see a horizontal line of links just below the green header. This is known as a "breadcrumb" trail, and shows whereabouts in the website the page you're looking at lives. Use these links to find your way back up the website structure.

Contacting us

If there are specific contact details for a page or section, a contact link will appear below the main menu on the right side of the screen. Alternatively, see our main contact us page.

Changing the appearance of the site

Can't read the site clearly? Click on the "Help and accessibility" link at the top of the page to reveal options for making the text larger or switching to an alternative colour scheme, intended for people with visual impairments.

Our website supports other methods you may use to make websites more clearly visible (such as making all your fonts large or using your own stylesheet). If you encounter a problem, contact Web Services and we will look into it.

Making web pages easier to read

The BBC have an excellent series of guides about how to change your computer settings to make things easier to read. BBC accessibility guides.

Listening to pages

You can also use the "Help and accessibility" link at the top of the page to find the "Listen to this page" link. This will read the page aloud using a service called Dixerit Plus.

Dixertit Plus provides a help page, which explains how to use it, but if you're having and problems you can contact Web Services.

Access keys

Access keys are for people who use a keyboard to navigate web pages instead of a mouse or pointing device. They allow you to skip to pages or parts of pages using keyboard shortcuts.

In Windows, press ALT and the key listed below then ENTER. On a Mac, press CONTROL and the key listed below followed by ENTER.

This website uses the following access keys, which follow UK Government recommendations:

Access key S - Skip to content
Access key 1 - Home page
Access key 2 - News
Access key 3 - Site map
Access key 4 - Search
Access key 6 - Website help
Access key 7 - Complaints
Access key 8 - Terms and conditions
Access key 9 - Website feedback

Search

The search box appears at the top right of every page.

Filtering search results

If you get too many search terms, you can filter the results by type or subject using the links on the right of the search results page. Use this to narrow down the results or make sure you only see results that you're interested in.

More specific searches

By default, if you put more than one word in your search, the results page will show pages which include either of those words, but with pages that contain both of them listed first.

You can make your search more specific using the modifiers listed below:

• To get results that contain all the words you enter, put AND in between them, e.g bus AND passes AND concessions.
• To search for an exact phrase, put the terms in speech marks, e.g "bus passes".
• To specify words or phrases which must be included, use the "+" symbol in front of the relevant term, e.g +bus (single word) or +"bus passes" (phrase).
• To specify words or phrases which you want to exclude, use the"-" symbol in front of the relevant term, e.g -bus (single word) or -"bus passes" (phrase).
• Combine all the above to get results which exactly meet your requirements, e.g "bus pass" -oxford +discount will return pages that definitely contain the word "discount", definitely does not contain the word "oxford", and also probably contains the phrase "bus pass".

Can't find what you searched for?

Not everything the council published online is covered by our search. If you can't find what you're looking for, try these other search pages:

• Committee papers
• Jobs
• Adult learning courses
• Library catalogue
• Consultations
• Heritage Search
• Travel disruptions and roadworks
• Planning applications that the county council decides

Printing pages

All articles on our site have a "Print" button at the bottom of the page. This loads an alternative version of the page which is ideal for printing. It'll remove unneccessary graphics and navigation.

News feeds (RSS)

Wherever you see the orange RSS symbol, you can click it to get to a news feed. Feeds allow you to have news, updates, podcasts (online radio or TV shows) and many other pieces of web content delivered to one place. See the BBC's News feeds page for more information about why you might want to use them, and how.

Downloading documents

We have lots of PDF document files on our website. These are usually marked with the PDF symbol, and are always labelled. This means you'll always know that a link leads to a PDF before you click it and how large the file is.

To view PDF files, you'll need software such as Adobe Reader on your computer. This software is free to download.

Anything over 1 MB (1,000 KB) could be considered large, and may take some time to download on slow Internet connections.