Website accessibility policy

The Employers’ Forum on Disability web sites provide a growing number of online services, including the dissemination of news and information, as well learning resources, to a wide audience.

It is therefore the duty of the Employers' Forum on Disability to ensure that these web-based resources are as accessible as possible for everyone, including disabled people, whatever their access requirements.

People with disabilities may need to use assistive technologies to view web pages and web content should be accessible to these technologies. Special techniques or separate resources for disabled users are not required; following simple principles of usable and accessible design is often all that is needed. These principles are universal and thus will benefit disabled and non-disabled users.


Policy statement

We have worked to make the Employers’ Forum on Disability’s web-based resources as accessible as possible for everyone, including disabled people, whatever their access requirements.

It is the policy of the Employers’ Forum on Disability to make reasonable adjustments in order to make all web-based information, services and learning resources on our websites accessible to all users.


Our design standard

 We intend to make all web content conform to the W3C/WAI’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0. WGAG 1.0 is a World Wide Web Consortium recommendation dated May 5 1999; Version 2.0 is currently at the review stage.

Any third party contracted to design a website hosted by the Employers' Forum on Disability will be required to comply with these guidelines.

We will review the policy in the future to consider updating it to an advanced version of the W3C’s WCAG once available.


What does this mean in practice?

We follow a list of accessibility guidelines when designing or commissioning websites and their content. This includes;

Structure
        • Rather than creating multiple versions of this site, make one accessible version of the site.
        • Make the site structure as clear and consistent as possible.
        • Provide a site map to show how the site is organised.
        • Keep everything as simple as possible.

Content
        • Clearly label each section, and always lead with the most specific information.
        • Structure pages of text well, with clear and meaningful headings.
        • Provide appropriate text alternatives for all images.

Visual and other multimedia elements
        • Use only relevant images.
        • ‘Clickable’ elements in the interface, such as buttons and tabs will be large enough (or will have enough space around them) for visitors to use easily.
        • Provide support for increasing text size, and use large fonts in general.

Browser support
As well as supporting all standards-compliant browsers, we design our sites to support the following specific browsers.
        • Internet Explorer 5, 5.5 and 6 for Windows
        • Internet Explorer 5 for Macintosh
        • Mozilla Firefox for Windows, Macintosh and Linux
        • Opera 8 for Windows
        • Safari for Macintosh


Accessibility standards

We do not display accessibility-standards approved badges on our sites. Tools such as WebXACT (formerly known as Bobby) can help us to make the site accessible, but cannot help us make the site usable. In addition to using these accessibility tools we also have our sites tested by a diverse range of users during several phases, we use the feedback from these tests to improve the user experience and provide an accessible and inclusive website.

It is our target to achieve the highest level of accessibility for the required functionality, as measure against version 1.0 of the WCAG for our sites. We are aware that a number of these checkpoints are subjective and there may be instances where interpretation may vary.