Accessibility Statement
Our approach and commitment to accessibility is a priority to us. That’s why we’ve built this website to adhere to standards set forth by the World Wide Web Consortium.
Accessibility and Web Standards
The W3C issues coding standards for use by web developers. These standards ensure users with disabilities or impairment have an equal chance at accessing content published on the web. For instance, many visually impaired users browse the web using screen readers, hardware and software devices that probe the website’s source code and relay discernable content back to an audio device which the user then hears.
This accessible website was designed and developed by Jimmyweb website design and records the main steps that we have taken within this website design, to accommodate the needs of people with disabilities.
Unfortunately, when web developers fail to account for web standards, it creates a layer of inaccessibility for devices like the screen reader. In today’s world, there are so many different devices, from cell phones to PDAs, that browse the web. If we fail to adhere to web standards, we risk shutting out the content of our site to those users. As you can see, the importance of web standards is probably underestimated today.
We wish for all people to have access at all times. This website has been designed with the intention of making the content accessible to the widest range of visitors. To achieve this we adhere to best practices, such as compliance with W3C standards; and by careful reference to the standards set out by other organisations to improve access for everyone.
Standards compliance
Standards compliance is important to us, the pages on this website have been built to comply with a minimum standard of WCAG AA, complying with all priority 1 and 2 guidelines of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. As part of our Standards compliance efforts, all web pages on this website validate as HTML 4.01 Strict. The website design is structured to use semantic markup. H1 tags are used for main titles, H2, H3 and H4 tags for subtitles.
Navigation aids
All web pages contain a link to the home page, and the menu system has been designed in a consistent fashion throughout the website to increase overall access to all of the information that is available.
Links
Many links have title attributes, which describe the link in greater detail. Links are written to make sense out of context. All links linking to web pages within this website open in the existing window. Only links, linking to external website pages open in new windows.
Fonts
This website uses only font sizes compatible with user specified text size option in visual browsers.
Many website visitors with impaired vision need to increase the font size from the default Medium setting to Larger or Largest.
Some visually impaired website users need to take further steps to make websites visible. Internet Explorer and many other browsers enable you to specify your own Cascading Style Sheet that will override the styling of the websites that you view. This will give you full control of the visual appearance of the text in website design. You can find out more about specifying your own CSS file by using the Help function within your web browser software.
Visual design
This web site design uses cascading style sheets for visual layout. If your browser or browsing device does not support stylesheets at all, the content of each page is still readable.
Images
All images used in this standards compliant website design include descriptive ALT attributes and/or TITLE attributes to explain the significance of each image to non-visual readers and to give further information on the image.
