This page aims to explain the features that are included in this website to improve its accessibility
This site uses a font named "Open Sans", which is a "sans-serif" font. A serif is a small decorative line that is found on some letters in "serif" fonts. Serif fonts can be difficult to read for some people because the serifs can distract from the overall shape of the letter. Also, on screens, serifs can be distorted, causing words to blur. Open Sans has been optimised for print, web, and mobile interfaces, and has excellent legibility & readability characteristics.
The use of bold and italics has been minimised. Text that is emphasised is separated from normal by use of boxes and only titles appear in italics
Most text on this site is sized at 12pt. The number of variations of font sized have been minimised
To change the size of the text:
High contrast colours are used: black text on white background, or white text against a dark-coloured background. The background and foreground colour combinations used are:
A minimum colour contrast of 6.79:1 meets Level AA of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)
Each page on this site should have a clear, descriptive heading. A global navigation menu appears in the same place across the top of each page. A separate section menu appears on the left-hand side of the page if required. At any point, you can return to the library homepage by clicking on the "Home" link
When pages are too long to be seen on one screen, you can return to the top of the page by clicking this on the right-hand side of the page
Alternative Text is provided for images to gives descriptions for use by screen reader software, or where an image fails to load correctly.
Links between pages are clearly denoted by colour of text. Descriptive links - naming or describing the linked site are used. URLs themselves are never used as links,
Links may be provided to Portable Document Format (PDF) files. You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader to view these files. Adobe Acrobat Reader can be downloaded free of charge from the Adobe website. Note that Adobe Reader has a Read Out Loud feature which will read the PDF to you. Instructions for its use can be found here
The site has been tested using the WAVE Web Accessibility Toolkit, part of a suite of evaluation tools, created by WebAIM, intended to help website creators and managers make their web content more accessible to individuals with disabilities or impairments. While there are no accessibility errors flagged by this tool, there are several alerts:
The site has also been tested with the Tingtun Page Checker created by the European Internet Inclusion Initiative project and again, no accessibility errors were found
Automated tools provide immediate feedback and are a quick and useful method of helping make a website more accessible, however they are limited; no tool can detect every barrier to accessibility; hence this site may contain accessibility barriers that have not been found by automated tools or by manual checking.
If you find an accessibility barrier, please contact the library
