Help / Accessibility

Our websites are designed to meet accessibility guidelines devised by the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB). RNIB advises on meeting the needs of all web users. RNIB’s ‘See it Right’ guidelines are the basis for some of the following text. (Some text has been reproduced with permission from RNIB).

Content

We ensure our content is clear and easily understood. Here are some of the ways that we do that:

Style sheets

The site is designed so each page is still readable and clearly structured if your browsing device doesn’t support style sheets.

You may import your own style sheet into this website.

Text

Our text is concise and written in plain English. We use layout to make the text easy for you to read and scan read on screen. Examples are bullet points and meaningful headings.

All text is resizable. If it is too small or large for easy reading, you can use your browser settings to display it at the size you prefer.

If you’ve already selected a non-standard text size in your browser settings, the size you prefer will be visible from the moment you enter the website. You won't need to reset it for each page.

Colour

We choose colours that provide a good contrast between the text and its background. We avoid combinations that are known to cause difficulties for people with colour blindness.

We use colour styling that ensures no parts of the page are unreadable if you choose non-standard colours in your browser colour settings.

A change of colour won't be used as the only way to identify any information. So, for instance, you won't see phrases such as ‘new courses are shown in red text’.

If you wish to override the site's colours, you can import your own style sheet.

Images

We use images for several purposes. For each, a text alternative is provided

• for images used as links, the text alternative tells you about the destination page
• for informative images, the text alternative contains the information that the image contributes to the page
• for images of text, the visible text is stated
• for images that are purely decorative, the alternative text will be empty so that the image is 'silent' when a screen reader reads the page

Structure

Here are some features of the structure of our websites.

Navigation

You can reach all parts of the website by following keyboard navigable links. This means you can use your keyboard tab key or switch device to move from link to link. No parts of the site are ‘hidden’ behind links that can only be displayed by mouse action.

We provide breadcrumb trails throughout the site and apply navigational aids whenever possible.

Links

We choose the wording for text links to ensure the link is

• clear, giving you a good idea of what the destination page is about
• unique, so that each one is different, unless it leads to the same page as any others using the same wording
• complete, not relying on nearby text to explain its purpose or context
• concise, as short and to the point as possible
• quick to identify, not beginning with words like ‘click here for’ or ‘link to’
• meaningful – not made up of a single word like ‘here'.

Page titles

Titles are different on each unique page, and give a good indication of their content. This will help you keep track of where you are in the website. It also makes it possible to distinguish between pages when you have more than one window or tab open.

Headings

Headings are relevant and provided in a logical order so that you can use them to get an overview of the page.

If you’re a screen reader user, this means you can:

• use screen reader functions to jump from heading to heading
• display a list of all headings and go straight to the one of most interest to you.

Data tables

Tables are given row and column headings where necessary. These are not only visually different from the data cells, but coded so screen readers can identify them. Screen reader users can find out what the relevant headings are, from anywhere within the table grid.

Forms

Completing forms is easy because the information you need to complete each box is clear and well positioned. We also ensure that you can complete our forms without the use of a mouse and using a screen reader.

Our forms have a logical and clear structure, with instructions at each stage.

Search

A search facility is available throughout the site to help you find information and courses. The access key ALT+4 (Windows) or Control+4 (Macintosh) will take you to the search field.

New windows

You won't find many uses of new windows in the site. We usually only use new windows for audio and video. Where we use new windows, you’ll find a warning in the link text or the sentence the link is given in.

Audio and video

Any information that is presented in video, audio or multimedia will have alternatives that make the same information available to people who are unable to see or hear.

This means that captioning or transcripts are used to complement audible or visible information.

PDF files

You need Adobe Acrobat Reader installed on your computer to open PDF files. You can download this for free from Adobe's website.

All PDF files on this website have been made accessible to the best of the document’s ability.

JavaScript

JavaScript is often used to add animation to websites. We ensure that our use of JavaScript doesn’t make any aspect of our websites impossible to reach.

Any moving images that are created using JavaScript can be stopped. All controls can be operated by either the mouse or keyboard.

Standards compliance

We comply with the accessibility standards and guidelines set out by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

All pages on this site aim to be accessible to WAI WCAG AA or better, complying with priority 1 and 2 guidelines of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

All pages on this site aim to validate as XHTML 1.0 Strict, and use CSS 2.1 for visual presentation.

All pages on this site use structured semantic markup.