Accessibility

The PSEAW is committed to ensuring our website is accessible to the community that we serve. We aim to be standards compliant and we recognise the need to take reasonable steps to enable access to our website for those with impaired sight or other disabilities.

This site has been redesigned with web accessability at the forefront of the planning. The site uses CSS and HTML throughout. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are used to separate visual formatting from structural markup.

• This site is valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional.
• This site uses valid CSS 2.0.

Through taking this approach we hope to make our site as inclusive as possible, and also to comply with UK legislation including the Disability Discrimination Act (1995) as amended by the Special Education Needs and Disability Act (2001), which states that it is an offence to discriminate against a disabled person by treating him or her less favourably than others for a reason relating to their disability.

All pages conform at a minimum to Level A compliance as specified by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Some pages have discrepancies due to menu javascript, but these did not affect the ability to browse in text and screen reading browsers. Most Level AA and some Level AAA requirements are also met.

We strive to obey the spirit of the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) of 1995 with respect to the provision of services online, as required by the Disability Rights Commission (DRC).

Navigation Aids:

• All pages include a menu bar for easy navigation.
• All pages include a search box.
• All pages link to a site map to aid site navigation.

Links:

Many links have title attributes which describe the link in greater detail, unless the text of the link already fully describes the target.

Images:

All content images used on the home page and all other pages include descriptive ALT attributes.

Validation:

All the pages included in the site have been validated as much as possible. We have used many different programs, text readers and tools to ensure the site is as easy as possible to use by as many people as possible.

Colourblind users:

We have also used various online tools to determine how easy it will be for our colourblind users to navigate the site, making sure to avoid troublesome colours in places of importance.

Pictures:

We have strived to make sure that users who cannot display pictures will still be able to navigate to every part of the site. At no point on the site is there a link on an image without there being a text link right next to it.

Blind users:

We have tested the site with various screen readers and have found the site to be extremely useable. We recommend the following software: http://www.screenreader.net

Spelling:

The entire site has been spell checked where possible. Anything forthcoming that will be put on the site will also be spellchecked.

Access Keys

Some of the most important links to pages and sections on our site have access keys in order to allow people without a mouse to quickly navigate to these areas. The combination of keys used varies from browser to browser, but here are the most common:

Access Keys on this site:

Links:

http://www.w3.org/ - World wide web consortium homepage

http://www.screenreader.net - FREE Screenreader

http://www.browsealoud.com/ - Texthelp Systems

http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/ - CSS Validator