Accessibility Statement

This is the official accessibility statement for the United Kingdom Programme Action Committee. If you have any questions or comments, please contact us.

A Note on Browser Compatibility

The best way to make a website accessible is to follow the latest HTML and CSS standards. This makes pages instantly accessible to assistive technologies such as voice-synthesising browsers and text-only browsers, because they are designed to work with these standards.

In choosing to make a website accessible, we are also choosing not to make it compatible with older browsers that do not fully support these standards, such as Netscape version 4. On these browsers, elements of the visual layout will be lost. We have tested sample pages in the Web Page Backward Compatibility Viewer, which simulates a variety of older browsers, and found that the text is usually still readable, and the site usable, even though the style is compromised.

We recommend you keep your browser up-to-date to show your support for website standards and their accessibility benefits. The latest versions of all major browsers are standards-compliant, and they are getting even better. So far we have successfully tested sample pages on the following browsers:

• Mozilla Firefox
• Internet Explorer 6.0 and above
• Opera
• Safari

Most browser manufacturers provide free upgrades on their websites. If you are not sure which version you have, go to your browser's "Help" menu, and choose "About..." (eg "About Internet Explorer"). This will tell you which version you are running.

Standards Compliance

1. All pages on this site are Bobby AA approved. Not all aspects of a website can be tested automatically; as well as using the automated online test on sample pages, we have reviewed all the guidelines visually and believe that all our pages are in compliance.
2. All pages on this site are WCAG AA approved. This means they comply with all priority 1 and 2 checkpoints of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. We have reviewed all the guidelines and believe that all our pages are in compliance.
3. All pages on this site comply with all of the US Federal Government Section 508 Guidelines.
4. All pages on this site are coded to Strict XHTML 1.0 standards. This can be verified automatically, and we have tested sample pages on the W3C online HTML validator.
5. All pages on this site use structured semantic markup. "h1" tags are used for main headings, "h2" tags for sub-headings, and so on. This allows text-only or speech browsers to understand the page structure, and interpret it for their users. Users can jump between headings, scanning the page, helping them to find the information they want as quickly as sighted visitors. Many websites on the internet, including our old site, only indicate headings visually, for example through a change in colour or font size, without correctly marking the structure. This prevents blind users from using many of the time-saving features in their browsing devices.

Links

1. Links are written to make sense out of context. Most text-only and speech synthesising browsers have the option of listing all links in a page. This helps blind users to scan the site and reach the information they are looking for as quickly as a sighted user.
2. Many links have title attributes that describe the link in greater detail, unless the link text already fully describes the target (such as the headline of an article).
3. Our links do not automatically open new browser windows, which can be confusing and inconvenient for many users, particularly blind people navigating using the keyboard and a speech-synthesising browser.

Images

1. All images used in this site include descriptive ALT attributes. These are read out by speech browsers, and displayed by text-only browsers instead of the image itself. This helps blind or partially sighted visitors to understand the significance of each image.
2. Purely decorative graphics include null ALT attributes, so that they are ignored by speech and text-only browsers.

Visual Design

1. This site uses cascading style sheets for all visual formatting and positioning.
2. This site uses only relative font sizes, compatible with the "font re-size" options in most visual browsers.
3. In browsers or browsing devices that do not support stylesheets at all, such as text-only browsers, the content of each page is still readable. We have tested pages in visual browsers with stylesheets switched off, as well as in the Lynx Viewer, which simulates how pages look in the text-only browser Lynx.
4. We believe our colour scheme gives adequate contrast between foreground text and backgrounds for partially sighted users. If you do have trouble with the colours, you can over-ride them with your own preferences.
5. We believe our colour scheme is readable for people with different forms of colour-blindness. We have tested sample pages using the Vischeck online colour-blindness simulator.
6. No page in the site relies on colour alone to convey information.

Accessibility Tips

Re-sizing text

To make website text bigger:

• In Internet Explorer, go to "View" in the menu bar, then choose "Text Size" from the menu, and select the option you want (e.g. "Larger" or "Largest").
• In Netscape browsers, go to "View" in the menu bar, then choose "Text Zoom" from the menu, and you can choose exactly how much you want your text to be increased, in percentages (eg "150%", "200%").

You will find that this re-sizes all the text on this website, including the menu options. Many websites on the internet, including our old site, fix the text size at an absolute number of pixels, a setting that Internet Explorer cannot over-ride. Our new site uses relative font sizes so that they are completely flexible to users' needs.

Many sites also use images for their menu items, which are fixed in size. Our new site uses text links, made to look like buttons using stylesheets, so when you re-size your text, the menu re-sizes as well. Using text instead of images for the navigation also makes the site quicker to download.

Over-riding colours

If you have difficulty reading our colour scheme, or any other website, you can over-ride the colours, choosing a more comfortable combination:

• In Internet Explorer, go to the "Tools" menu and choose "Internet Options". Select the "Colors" button to choose your colours. Or select the "Accessibility" button to tell the browser to ignore colours, font styles and font sizes.
• In Netscape, go to the "Edit" menu and choose "Preferences". Then select "Appearance", and select "Colors" from the menu. You can choose your text and background colours, and tell the browser to ignore colours specified in web pages.

Navigation aids

Some websites use rel=previous, next, up, and home links in the "head" of the html page. These are usually hidden from visual browsers, but help users of text-only browsers to navigate through a series of pages. This website does not currently use these links. We thought you may like to know about them in case they help you to navigate other websites.

• Netscape 6 and Mozilla users can take advantage of this feature by selecting the "View" menu, choosing "Show/Hide", then "Site Navigation Bar", and selecting the option you require (eg "Show Only As Needed" or "Show Always").

Some Accessibility Software

1. JAWS, a screen reader for Windows. A time-limited, downloadable demo is available.
2. Home Page Reader, a screen reader for Windows. A downloadable demo is available.
3. Lynx, a free text-only web browser for blind users, with refreshable Braille displays.
4. Links, a free text-only web browser for visual users with low bandwidth.
5. Opera, a visual browser with many accessibility-related features, including user stylesheets. A free downloadable version is available.