Accessibility

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

Some parts of our web presence are more accessible than others, but our aim is that they should all be at least level "A" compliant with the WAI guidelines. Many pages are already "AA" compliant, and our ultimate goal is to achieve "AA" compliance wherever possible.

Currently, our Patent Information Expert Services are not accessible to users with disabilities. We aim to rectify that in the near future.

Content of some e-learning modules may not be visualised correctly in all browsers.

Font size

The EPO website is designed so that you can change the text size using your browser settings.

• Internet Explorer
  Select "Zoom" in the "View" menu (hit the Alt key if the menu is not visible). You can also zoom in and out - increasing or decreasing the size of all elements, not just the text - by holding down the Ctrl key and pressing plus (+) or minus (-).
• Chrome
  Select “Zoom” in the Chrome menu and click on plus (+) to increase the text size or minus (-) to decrease it. You can also hold down the Crtl key and press the plus (+) or minus (-) key.
• Firefox
  Select "Text size" in the "View" menu or hold down the Ctrl key and press the plus key (+) to increase the text size or the minus key (-) to decrease it.
• Safari
  Select "Make text bigger" or "Make text smaller" in the "View" menu, or press Command and plus (+) or minus (-).

Breadcrumb navigation

You can navigate quickly back through the structure of the website by using the "breadcrumbs":

Contact us

If you encounter an inaccessible page on this website, 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 reasonable time.