Accessibility
Our accessibility section covers:
Accessibility statement
We are committed to enabling as many people as possible access to our website. By improving the accessibility and usability of our site, we are seeking to meet the requirements of all our users.
We are currently working across our web presence to ensure that we comply with all of the priority 1(A) accessibility checkpoints as established by the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). The WAI promotes usability and accessibility for people with disabilities and promotes good practice amongst the web community.
We will be making continual improvements to our websites aiming to fulfill priority 2 (AA) checkpoints.
We realise the importance of ensuring this site is accessible to all our visitors. To this end we commissioned
Shaw Trust to undertake an Accessibility Audit in 2011 and the site was awarded the Shaw Trust ‘Accessible’ rating. The site has since been updated and we intend to undertake this audit again once changes have been made.
About the Web Accessibility Initiative
The
Web Accessibility Initiative promotes usability and accessibility for people with disabilities and promotes good practice amongst the web community
Access keys
The UK Government Access Keys Standard has been applied to this site. These provide a keyboard shortcut for users wishing to go directly to specific parts of the site and help those who do not use a pointing device, such as a mouse. To use the access keys press "Alt" then the number, then press your enter key.
A subset of the standard has been used and the access keys are defined as follows:
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S = Skip navigation
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1 = Home page
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2 = News page
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3 = Site map
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6 = Help
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7 = Contacts
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8 = Disclaimer
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0 = Key details
Visitors using recent versions of screen readers can navigate using the following keystrokes:
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H to cycle forwards through the headings
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Shift + H to cycle backwards through the headings
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1 to navigate to the next level 1 heading (or a number between 1 and 6 to navigate to the next heading on this level)
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Shift + 1 to navigate to the previous level 1 heading (or a number between 1 and 6 to navigate to the previous heading on this level)
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INSERT + F6 to provide a list of all headings
In Opera, the following keys can be used to navigate headings:
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S to cycle forwards through the headings
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W to cycle backwards through the headings
Alternative text
All images on this site are accompanied by a brief alternative text which, where appropriate, identifies an image or its function. This alternative text (alt-text) is generally only visible when the browser's automatic image loading feature is turned off.
Those in purely decorative graphics or used for layout include null ALT attributes
Links
All text links are written so that they make sense when read out of context.
PDFs
Most complex Adobe® Acrobat® Portable Document Format (PDF) files on this site are tagged to allow basic accessibility. Simple PDFs should not represent an accessibility problem.
For more information about PDF accessibility see the
Adobe website accessibility section.
Text size
The font used on our website can be changed in size in your browser settings to your own preference.
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In Microsoft Internet Explorer choose View/ then Text Size and select the size you require
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In Firefox choose View then Text Size/Increase or Decrease
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In Safari choose View then Make Text Bigger or Make Text Smaller
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In Opera choose View then Zoom and then a percentage
Further information on increasing the text size in your web browser, operating system and applications such as Word , Open Office Writer and Adobe Acrobat can be found on the following 'My Web My Way' pages on the
BBC website.
Changing colours
The colours on our site are normally controlled using cascading style sheets. However, users can change the site's background colour, which can be particularly useful for those who rely on magnification technology as a white background can produce an uncomfortable glare. It is also possible to change the colour of body text on the site.
Further information on how you can change text and background colours in your browser and operating system to better suit your needs can be found on the following 'My Web My Way' pages on the
BBC website.
Visual design
This site uses cascading style sheets for visual layout. If your browser or browsing device does not support style sheets at all, the content of each page should still be readable.
