Accessibility

The Disability Rights Commission (DRC) is passionate about the accessibility of its website. Our website has been designed with a number of accessibility features. The key features include:

Access options page

You can use the access options page to easily change this site to meet your needs. You can change the text size; change the website's colour scheme; use access keys to navigate the site; and use a choice of text-to-speech systems.

Alternative text

Images on our website have alternative text attributes, often known as alt text. This means that when an image is used on a web page to convey information its content is also described in the alt text. This means that the image can be understood by text browsers and assistive technologies such as screen readers. If an image is used for simply decorative purposes, the text attribute for the image is left empty in line with accepted best practice.

Readable and resizable fonts and layout

The DRC website uses font sizes that you can control using your web browser.

You can change the text size in Microsoft Internet Explorer by selecting View > Text size followed by your preferred text size from 'Smallest' to 'Largest'. The default setting is 'Medium'.

You can change the text size in Mozilla Firefox by selecting View > Text size followed by 'Increase' or 'Decrease'. To return the text size to its default setting, select 'Normal'.

The website's fonts have been chosen for their legibility on computer screens. The website's layout has been designed to stretch to fill the width of the browser, so that you can resize the browser to suit your own viewing preferences.

Minimising the use of images

Live text is used rather than graphics wherever possible to reduce page download time and to increase your control over text size.

Making content more accessible

The website has more than 2 hours of video clips about disability rights in British Sign Language. It also has a section of easy-to-read pages.

Help us to help you

We seek to meet the Priority A, AA, and selected AAA guidelines of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Our website is tested on a regular basis using a combination of automated tools to identify potential problem areas and manual testing to ensure we meet the spirit as well as the letter of the W3C's accessibility guidelines.

Inevitably, we won't always get it right, and with over 5,000 pages of content we are bound to miss some problems, but we are committed to addressing any access issues promptly. And that's where we'd like your help. If you experience any difficulties in accessing our website, or have trouble using any aspect of the website, we'd like you to let us know. Contact us and let us know your experience.

User-testing

We have conducted several phases of user-testing of the whole website and of new sections. We always involve disabled people with a range of impairments in this testing and we make any changes needed to make the site more accessible and easy-to-use.

Print page options 

A print page facility is provided on every page of the website.  The size of the print text will reflect the text option you have selected within the website.  For example, if you have large print selected on the website, the print page facility will print in large print.

Skip navigation options

Using the S key will enable non visual browsers to skip navigation.  The facility to skip navigation works on three levels, level one will skip global navigation, level two will skip to content, level three will skip section navigation.