https://www.epo.org/en/accessibility

Accessibility

The European Patent Office strives to make its epo.org website accessible to people with disabilities, in accordance with the guidelines issued by the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) .

Our goal is to achieve Level AA compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1.

This website has been designed to allow you to:

  • increase or decrease the size of most texts
  • navigate using keyboard shortcuts
  • use a screen reader

Accessibility checks

The EPO conducts regular automated testing on its website to identify and correct accessibility issues. Our tool checks:

  • Colour contrast
  • Alternative texts for images
  • Headings
  • Form labels
  • Keyboard accessibility
  • Accessible rich internet application (ARIA) attributes
  • Landmarks
  • Tables

The tool is set up to test for WCAG 2.1 Level A and AA and WAI-ARIA 1.2.

Non-accessible content

While we strive to achieve Level AA compliance, some content and services may not be accessible, including:

  • some of the EPO’s online services and advanced tools linked from this website
  • PDFs and other downloads linked from this website
  • some images which may not have a text alternative, or where the text may not describe the image accurately

Contact us

We aim to continually improve the accessibility of this website. If you encounter an inaccessible page or feature, please report the problem to website@epo.org.

We cannot guarantee that we will be able to fix it immediately, but we will make every effort to do so in a reasonable time or provide the information by alternative means.

Visiting our buildings

The EPO strives to make all its buildings as accessible as possible to people with disabilities. Your contact points for assistance are listed on our Locations page.