Accessibility

It’s important at bss for our website to be accessible to people with disabilities. We achieve this by complying with the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

WAI provides a detailed list of priorities to achieve accessibility. Many of these priorities are quite technical in nature, but the following points provide examples of the kind of measures we have taken to ensure ease of access.

• Labelling images so that blind people can understand a web page (you can see this when you hover your pointer over a picture and a small piece of text appears – if it makes sense to you then it would to a blind person because their text-to-speech software would read it to them);
• Colour choice – there are various colours that partially blind and colour blind people cannot see;
• We use simple English;
• If tables are used then the rows and columns are labelled appropriately;
• The use of applets and scripts need an alternative. Imagine the use of a drop down menu that cascades to one side – for a visually impaired person this is impossible to ‘see’ using a text to voice reader;
• Use of style sheets to control layout and presentation – so that users get ‘used’ to the way a page is laid out;
• Use relative rather than absolute units in markup language attribute values and style sheet property values. This means that when a page is viewed in different screen resolutions it still makes sense and that users who wish to increase the font size in a web page can do so.
• We use navigation mechanisms consistently.
• Please be aware that the corporate video on the homepage and Inisght (our e-newsletter) do not meet usability and accessibility requirements as they are not built to do so.
  
  
  

Text only version

The creation of a text only version of this website was considered and a decision was made to only provide a normal version of the site. By keeping the graphics small, and following accessibility guidelines, we have ensured that users who are partially sighted or blind can still reach our information in this single format.