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Accessibility

General

Our website is designed to be accessible to as many people as possible including those with a disability.

A key element to making a website accessible is realising that different disabilities have different requirements. What may make a website site very accessible for someone with one disability may preclude accessibility for someone with another. White text on a black background could be best for a person with visual impairment, but inaccessible for someone with dyslexia.

Therefore this site is laid out with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). This means that the information on the styling of pages is held in a separate file, which can be ignored by assistive technology like screen readers and users can also tailor the styling to their own specific needs.

Dyslexia

To this end the default styling of this site specifically focus on meeting the needs of dyslexic people as this is our specific audience and client group. The style follows these rules to ensure accessibility specific to the dyslexic community:

  1. The use of cream background and brown text instead of the typical white black font on white. This is because many people with dyslexia have difficulties with visual processing and this colour scheme may go some way to reducing these difficulties.
  2. The restricted use of underlining (for example hyperlinks are only shown as underlined on rollover) because underlining makes text hard for dyslexic people to read and process which is often what we use to read as opposed to a letter by letter breakdown.
  3. Our pages are as uncluttered and well spaced as possible to help people navigate pages and lessen visual disturbance.
  4. The wording is aimed to be clear and concise as overly long/complex sentences can be difficult to access for people with short-term working memory difficulties. Although people with dyslexia have a unique profile of strengths and weaknesses, they share difficulty with short-term memory.

Technical

We are currently working to ensure that we comply with all of the Level (A) accessibility checkpoints as established by the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) web accessibility initiative (WAI) under the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) version 2.0. See http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/wcag.php