Our website is always being updated and improved. We’ve tried to build it in a way that places accessibility and usability at the centre. We want it to be accessible for everyone, no matter what technology you are using.
We believe you should be able to access this site’s information with assistive technology, like JAWS (Job Access With Speech), NVDA (Non-Visual Desktop Access), ZoomText, and Dragon Naturally Speaking. It should also be usable with screen magnifiers and your operating system’s speech recognition software.
Our accessibility features work when using the following browsers:
Help using your computer
If you need extra help in using computers, the web and assistive technology, we recommend you visit AbilityNet My Computer My Way who have free guides and offer help.
Skipping to main content
If you’re using a screen reader or keyboard, use the ‘Skip to content’ link at the top of every page to skip the navigation and get to the content quickly.
Making the text bigger or smaller
You may be able to change the text size in your browser. You should also be able to zoom in to magnify the text and images on the page by pressing ‘Ctrl’ and ‘+’ on the keyboard to zoom in, and ‘Ctrl’ and ‘-‘ to zoom out.
Change the colours
We’ve tried to use colours that make the words on our webpages easy to read, but we know that some people have trouble with reading text on certain colours. You may be able to use your own colours with your browser.
Document downloads
We aim to present all important information as HTML webpages, but we often provide our reports in downloadable PDF (Portable Document Format) and Word document formats.
For documents provided in PDF or Word document format, you may need to install some free software:
If you can’t open PDF documents, download the latest Adobe Reader software.
If you can’t open Word documents, download the latest Word viewer software or LibreOffice.
Easy Read documents
We try to make all our website content as easy to read as possible. Unfortunately, we will not be able to produce easy read versions of all the reports published on our website.
Heading structure
We do our best to ensure that all pages of our website have a correct heading structure, which makes them easier to navigate.
Images
To make things easier for screen reader users, all images in our site have alternative text that clearly describes what they show.
Language
We want to make sure that the language we use on the website is Plain English. No jargon, no unnecessary language, just simple and useful information.
Links
Our links always use link text that makes sense out of context, so that what we are linking to is clear to everyone.
Video
All the video content embedded on this site or on our YouTube channel is available to watch with optional subtitles, also known as Closed Captions. If your browser doesn’t support frames, you can read a written transcript of the film. We use YouTube for our videos because it is the most accessible way to present videos online that we know of, however, we cannot control the accessibility of YouTube video functionality.
Content from social media, such as Twitter and Facebook
In some parts of our site, we may display content from social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook. These sites often restrict the ways in which content can be displayed, and sometimes this means it is not as accessible as we would like. We try to keep these to a minimum and provide alternative content.
We would be very grateful for your feedback on how accessible our site is for you, so that we can keep improving it. Please email feedback to hello@shapingourlives.org.uk.