Accessibility for all
How we make our website easier for everyone to use.
What we do to help
We want our website to work for everyone, whatever your situation, technology or ability. That means making it easy to read, simple to navigate and accessible to all.
This is particularly important for:
- People who use assistive technology (like screen readers)
- Those who can’t use a mouse or other pointing devices
To help guide us, we follow the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 – aiming for at least Level AA – created by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). They explain how to make web content more accessible for people with disabilities – and we use them as a benchmark for everything we do.
What we’ve put in place
Here are some of the accessibility features we’ve built into our site:
Design
- Contrast between text and background colours for better visibility
- Text size can be changed depending on what works for you
- Clear, visible outlines on links so keyboard users can easily see where they are
- Links that do what they say or have additional, non-visible, information that can be read by screen reading devices
- Proper use of headings to help those using screen reading devices follow the structure of every page
- Correct use of tables to display the right tabular information, with headings and captions to support people using screen reading devices
- Use of cascading style sheets (CSS) to control the presentation of our website, keeping it separate from the structure to help those using screen reading devices
Content
- Text is broken up with clear headings and bullet points, and we keep paragraphs short
- Focus on readability – we use plain English so our content is clearer for all and easy to understand
- We avoid idioms, jargon or cultural references that might not make sense to everyone
- We use bold text to highlight key points – and steer clear of italics, underlines and words all capped, which can be hard to read
This website has been built using code that’s compliant with the latest W3C standards for HTML. Our site works well on today’s browsers – and because it’s built using valid HTML, it should keep running smoothly on future ones too.
Keeping things up to date
We regularly check our site using accessibility tools and audits. While we do our best to meet the latest guidelines and standards, we know tech moves fast. If we find anything that needs fixing, we work quickly to sort it out.