Accessibility Statement

Ideally, all websites could be used by – be accessible to – everyone. In practice, poor design, technology limitations (e.g. poorly built websites, older web browsers), and viewer's impairments (e.g. less acute sight) or disabilities get in the way.

Accessibility of a website is also affected by its usability, dealt with later on this page.

Conformance with UK Accessibility Legislation

Within the constraints of the limited resources of a modest charity, this website is designed to serve the largest possible audience, including many with impairments and disabilities. This is in line with the UK's Disability Discrimination Act (DDA).

Various checks provide technical assessments against criteria recommended by authoritative bodies. The criteria assessed, and the results, are as follows:

• Coding to the recommendations of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), or better for XHTML (XHTML markup validation check) and CSS (CSS 3 validation check)
• Checks against the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), which would be used when assessing conformance with the DDA. Using Cynthia, an automated tool to check a webpage, typical webpages on this website met WCAG level A, the minimum level advisable, when last tested. Every webpage is coded to the same standard. The website would also meet Priority 2 (i.e. level AA) conformance requirements, with minor modifications.

Note 1: despite the Disability Discrimination Act being in force since 1995, meeting the minimum level of accessibility is still not commonplace. Even with the resources of a bigger company, only two thirds of FTSE 250 companies were found in the fourth quarter of 2008 to meet the minimum accessibility requirements (Sitemorse report).

Note 2: the accessibility of websites starts from a low base. In a survey of 1000 websites, over 80% were found to be unusable by disabled users, including those of many well known organisations (BBC report on DRC's findings, April 2004).

Usability Informed by Research Findings

To enhance its usability, research findings have informed this website's layout and how it works e.g. clear layout; button-style main navigation; user-adjustable text size (look in your browser's menu); straightforward printing (ditto).

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