Accessibility Statement

• Help in making our website look the way you want
• Accessibility features
• Accessibility and usability of our site
• Browsealoud
• Feedback

Help in making our website look the way you want

My Computer My Way was developed by AbilityNet, Microsoft and the BBC as a source of accessibility help for all computer users.  It includes information on changing the colours and text size and style of our website and explains how these changes could be work on every site you visit.

Accessibility features

We offer the following accessibility features on our site:

• a skip to content link to help screen reader and keyboard users access content quickly
• a search facility and sitemap
• alternative stylesheets (or viewing themes), including a linearised version with large text and a version designed to assist reading for visitors with dyslexia
• resizable text
• a flexible page layout (the centre column resizes with the width of your browser window)

Accessibility and usability of our site

Our website strives to uphold the principles and best practice of the WCAG 1.0 AAA guidelines.  While we aim to comply with the WCAG guidelines, we recognise that web technology has moved on since their creation, and a number of them are less applicable than at their time of publication.  Our central objective is users finding our site accessible and usable in practice.  As with all sites we create, attention to the accessibility of the code and extensive end user testing ensures that this is the case.

Our site’s code

The site has been built to comply with standards (x)HTML and CSS2.  At every stage the code has been checked for accessibility using a range of automated and (more significantly) manual checks.  In older browsers (Netscape and Internet Explorer 4 and earlier) it will appear as an unstyled document.   All information and functionality will still be accessible.

‘Skip to’ Navigation Link

At the top of every page is a hidden link that is spoken by screen-reading software and will appear when 'tabbed to' using a keyboard. It is the first link and, when selected, will make reading skip past the rest of the menu items and commence at the beginning of the main page content.

Browsealoud

You can also make our website talk by downloading the free text to speech software BrowseAloud. Simply install it and then move your mouse over any text, link, picture or button and BrowseAloud will speak it to you. The download is approximately 2.5Mb.

Feedback

We welcome feedback on the Accessibility and usability of our website.  If you have had any problems or any issues while using our site, we would like to hear about it!  Email, phone and address details are on our AbilityNet contacts page.