Web standards
All of our websites meet Level AA of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 and we audit our sites at least quarterly. Our user experience (UX), development and search engine optimization (SEO) principles support this. Their implementation helps ensure that better quality digital properties are being created, and not only for users who may have a disability. We set these requirements out in our plans and testing.
We test against Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.2 (WCAG), published by World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
Accessibility roadmap
Our accessibility roadmap prioritises work in four broad areas:
1. Readability of our content with clear, understandable language and text alternatives for non-text content.
2. Design of user-interfaces ensuring our websites can be fully navigated by a mouse or keyboard, and meet the diverse needs of our service users.
3. Establishing technical development standards based on best practise.
4. Developing digital accessibility awareness and skills among our staff.
We will audit our websites in each quarter. We aim to deploy resulting fixes within one month of these audits.
Personalising your website experience
We are rolling out the EqualWeb accessibility widget to all our websites. This appears as a red icon on the left of the screen and enables users to personalise their experience including being able to read text to speech and adjust content including:
• Scaling
• Readable font, font size, line height, spacing, alignment and text magnifier
• Highlight titles and links
• Colours, contrast and saturation
• Orientation adjustments
EqualWeb can be opened by clicking the floating button at the bottom left of the screen.
AbilityNet also provides advice on making your computer or mobile device easier to use.
Accessibility across our websites
Text
We aim to write our text as clearly as possible using straight forward language and fonts that are clear and of high contrast. You can resize text using your browser settings or the accessibBe widget. We use headings and sub-headings to break up text and to aid screen readers.
Images
We are working to ensure all our images have alternative text which describes what is displayed on the screen. This is an on-going piece of work.
Links
All links written in sentences are clearly displayed in a different colour.
Navigation
We use consistent navigational aids throughout our websites. You can return to the homepage at any time by clicking our logo at the top left-hand corner.
Downloads
All our information publications are available to download as Adobe PDF files. To open our PDF files, you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader. You can download Adobe Acrobat Reader for free.
Page layout
We use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to build page layouts which means that pages are well structured and support most assistive technologies.