Web Accessibility

At Hertsmere Children's Centres we recognise the value of creating a website that is accessible to all web users. The majority of our pages are designed to meet 'level-A' compliance with the W3C Web Accessibility Guidelines 1.0.

Accessibilty features

The following steps have been taken in the design and coding of the site to ensure ease of access:

Coding standards

HTML heading tags are used to convey document structure. H1 tags are used for main titles, H2 tags for subtitles etc. Most pages on the site are valid HTML 4.01.

Navigation

For visually impaired users accessing the site via a screen reader, a hidden “skip navigation” option has been provided at the top of each page to facilitate easy access to the main page content. All core navigation is also rendered using readable text, rather than images.

Stylesheets (CSS)

This site uses cascading style sheets for all document layout. If your browser does not support stylesheets, the use of structured mark up should ensure that page content is still readable and clearly structured.

Font Sizes

To make it easier to read this website, all text has been made fully scaleable using CSS. You can adjust the text size by looking for the appropriate option in your browser preferences:

• In Internet Explorer; select View, then Text Size, and then your preferred size.
• In Mozilla/Firefox; select View, then Text Zoom, and then your preferred percentage size.

Colours & contrast

Colours are genearlly of strong contrast for on-screen reading. Additionally, a special 'high contrast' control is provided as an aid to visually impaired users. Alternatively, you may 'override' the default colours using a custom stylesheet should you wish. No part of the site is solely dependant on colour to be intelligible.

Images

All images used in this site have been assigned descriptive 'ALT' tag attributes. Where an image has is purely decorative, the 'ALT' tag is set to null to allow easy reading of the site by all users.

Browsers

All pages on this site have been designed to render correctly on all major operating systems (Windows 98 / XP / VISTA, MAC OSX, Linux) and web browsers (Micosoft Internet Explorer 6+, Mozilla Firefox & Safari).

Useful links:

If you are interested in learning more about web accessibility, please visit the following websites:

• RNIB - The Royal National Institute for the Blind
• Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
• AbilityNet - UK Charity helping disabled adults and children get the most from new technologies and the internet.

 

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