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Accessibility statement

This is the official accessibility statement for the Designers accessibility guidance. If you have any questions or comments please feel free to provide us with feedback.

Accesskeys

Most browsers support jumping to specific links by typing keys defined on the web site. On Windows, you can press ALT + an access key; on Macintosh, you can press Control + an access key.

All pages have the following accesskeys (a subset of the UK Government standard):

  • s - Skip to page content
  • 1 - Home page
  • 3 - Guideline index
  • 6 - Accessibility statement
  • 9 - Feedback

Standards Compliance

All pages on this site are WCAG-AAA approved - complying with all priority 1, 2 and 3 checkpoints of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines v 1.0. (more about WAI compliance).

Level Triple-A conformance icon, W3C-WAI Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0

All pages validate as XHTML 1.0 transitional - at present most NICS sites are HTML 4.1 Transitional but may move to XHTML in the future.

All pages conform to eGMS 2.0 - the UK Government's metadata standard.

Navigation aids

All pages use metadata (rel=prev, next, etc.) to assist with navigation on those browsers that support it. Currently (May 2004) this include Lynx, Netscape 6, Mozilla and Opera.

Links

Many links have title attributes (all the Next, Prev links in the top and bottom navigation bars) - these describe the link in greater detail.

In page links are written to make sense out of context.

Design

The site uses Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for layout and visual formatting (with rare exception for certain components of some pages). If your browser does not support CSS or your wish to turn it off then all pages are still easily readable and actionable.

All fonts are scalable - most browsers provide a means to specify default base text-size.

The site is of fixed width design - this was decided upon to improve the readability of the contents given the 2 column design. The site requires no horizontal scrolling for the most popular screen resolutions and window sizes (800x600, 1024x768)

Accessibility software

The most popular software that is useful for assisting access to Web sites is listed below. Some are free, some are commercial but have free demos.

  • JAWS , a screen reader for Windows. A time-limited, downloadable demo is available.
  • Home Page Reader , a screen reader for Windows. A downloadable demo is available.
  • Lynx , a free text-only web browser for blind users with refreshable Braille displays.
  • Links , a free text-only web browser for visual users with low bandwidth.
  • Opera , a visual browser with many accessibility-related features, including text zooming, user stylesheets, image toggle. A free downloadable version is available. Compatible with Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and several other operating systems.