Website Accessibility Info
Website Accessibility Standards Compliance
Overview
The Society for the Physically Disabled is committed to website accessibility. This website has been designed to meet all the accessibility guidelines set by the US and UK Disability Discrimination Act (D.D.A). The main body of this website passes all automated access checks to AAA Priority 3 including Cynthia, a tool for automated verification. Acknowledging these automated checks is often just the start of website accessibility. We have enforced these by visually checking and testing on a range of browsers, sized platforms, speech software and colour/contrast testing.
What is website accessibility?
- Website Accessibility refers to websites that are accessible to all visitors including visitors with disabilities who have difficulties with text and might require the use of speech readers or to read with high contrast or large text.
- Accessible websites can be used on multi-platforms (different internet browsers), multi-devices (different computers) and are easy to navigate and customise to a specific setting.
Navigating the SPD website
- We recommend that you view the site using Internet Explorer 7 (IE), FireFox or Opera
- Please use the site map to navigate the site without menus
This website offers 3 pre-formatted styles of display for different needs. They can be found at the top navigation of each page (Screen Styles).
Accessibility Features - Text Size, Contrast and Graphics.
Turning off CSS styles or using your own style sheets.
If the style sheet options included in the pages do not suit your vision needs, you can turn the styles off and reset them to suit you. This site has been designed to be compatible with all major browsers (IE, Firefox and Opera), the most common browser used by people with disabilities being IE. If you are using IE, please complete the following instructions:
- On the IE menu bar, select ‘Tools’ then ‘Internet Options’.
- In the ‘Internet Options’ dialog box, under the ‘General’ tab, select the ‘Accessibility’ button.
- In the ‘Accessibility’ dialog box, under ‘Formatting’:
Select the ‘Ignore colours specified on webpages’ check box.
Select the ‘Ignore font styles specified on webpages’ check box.
Select the ‘Ignore font sizes specified on webpages’ check box.
Select ‘OK’. - To close the ‘Internet Options’ dialog box:
Select ‘OK’
The above steps will override all font colours and sizes which you can now set to how best suits you. You will notice that the font is returned to black and white and the links are high defined.
Design
- A plain language approach is taken for all general content
- Graphic ‘roll-overs’ are used to aid visual navigation for people who find blocks of text difficult when navigating but do not impair navigation by speech reader
- Stylesheets are used to handle layout and presentation and printing
- Extensive browser testing has been undertaken
- On older browsers, content is displayed in the correct order, is fully legible and with all page elements are visible
- All text are resizable
- No device-dependent markup is used.
- A simple and consistent approach to navigation is used.
- All images are optimised for download.
- Text within images are used as little as possible.
- All images have been assigned ALT attributes
- Tables are used only for data
- Frames are not used
- All information conveyed with colour is also available without colour
- No flickering or movement is used on pages
This website is also coded to take off colours and styles to produce printer-friendly pages automatically when you print out a page.