Examples and tasks for useful Accessibility Statements
We are always improving our website. We aim to meet or exceed universal design best practices and web accessibility standards. We follow and support Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 AA.
To provide accessible web experiences, we strive to:
- Make our content and navigation easy to see
- Make it easy to interact using a mouse, keyboard, and/or touch screens
- Provide text and visual alternatives for sounds
- Provide text and audio alternatives for visuals
- Support popular assistive technology (like JAWS, NVDA and Dragon Naturally Speaking)
- Support using assistive technologies to navigate and access content
- Support the use of native accessibility features on mobile devices and tablets
We have built the site so that there is meaning structured into the pages so they are as inclusive as we can make them. As a result, mobile and assistive technology users will have a better experience. We provide HTML headings to provide a hierarchy of the content on a page. Pages include Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) Landmarks to highlight different content regions. These structures give screenreader users information they need to navigate our content.
Blind and low vision users often cannot see the images we use. It is important for our team to see that the meaning conveyed by those images is available in a textual form. We provide alt-text for images to help screenreader users to understand their meaning.
We want our users to get the most out of our site and so try to leverage approaches that are inclusive and flexible. Where we can we have included Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) as they are a more accessible and mobile friendly image format.
Every effort is made to have links written so that they make sense even out of context. For keyboard-only users the first link in every document is a "Skip to main content" link. This allows the user to skip over the navigation to the main content for the page.
This site is built on Drupal 8. This is a Content Management System (CMS) has had extensive accessibility improvements. Drupal is has very accessible web forms by default. Drupal 8’s web forms are designed to help users, even when they make a mistake when filling in the form. All form controls are clearly labeled for all abilities.
Users can choose if they want the text of the site to be bigger or smaller to suit their needs. Eight percent of men are colorblind, so we cannot convey information only with color. We use images or text along with color to see that nobody is excluded.
Users can adjust the size of the text by using a feature that is already built into all major browsers:
- Press Ctrl & + to increase the page size.
- Press Ctrl & - to decrease the page size.
- Press Ctrl & 0 (zero) to reset the page size to the web page's default size.
Our team creates practices that allow us to constantly improve our accessibility. We use some automated testing tools including Siteimprove and WebAIM's WAVE to test our site. We engage with accessibility experts to ensure we are using best practices. We also do manual testing to see that our sites are as accessible as we can make them. Finally, we do user testing with people with disabilities to find where we can improve.
We work to support both the latest release and the previous release of popular assistive technology and web browsers.
If you find anything on our sites or apps difficult to use, please let us know.