Accessibility Policy

PAS 78:2006 Guide to good practice in commissioning accessible websites

This site aims to achieve Priority 3 of the WAI Accessibility Guidelines as published by the Worldwide Web Consortium [W3C]. Measures taken to achieve this are as follows:-

All pages will be tested on development using the W3C Markup Validation Service v0.7.2. Pages will be required to pass the test using the online validator except when content feeds [e.g. RSS or XML] come from third parties whose code is not alterable by this site.
All pages will be tested on development using the W3C CSS Validation Service. Pages will be required to pass the test using the online validator except when content feeds [e.g. RSS or XML] come from third parties whose code is not alterable by this site.
The Home and a random selection of pages[ minumum 5% of the number of pages published to the site] will be tested using the Watchfire WebXACT Validator. All tested pages will be required to pass the Automatic checkpoints to Priority 3. With regard to manual checkpoints these will be reviewed and a report issued detailing why the points raised have been consider suitable to remain as warnings.
All pages will be checked for their “Tab Index” and notes are provided for guidance on the tab index order on the Accessibility Help page
Periodic checks will be made of the site during normal use using the suggested viewing options put forward on the Accessibility Help page

Users are actively encouraged to participate by informing us of any problems incurred, so that suitable corrective action can be taken.

Tests with actual disabled users

The PAS 78 guide looks for sites to have completed actual tests with a variety of disabled users, for which it gives profiles under its Annex A. Currently we are trying to put together a set of users that can be used for testing, although we have to say this is difficult from a practical viewpoint.

Current legal requirements suggest that web owners take reasonable steps to prevent discrimination and as it stands we feel that completing the tests above would provide this requirement of reasonableness under current legislation, although we would point out that case law has yet to test this theory.