Accessibility Statement

This is the official accessibility statement for Support in Mind Scotland. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to Contact Us.

Standards compliance

1. All pages in this site have been written to validate as XHTML 1.1 Strict. Follow this link to check the home page for XHTML validity.
   
2. The style sheets used in this site have been written using valid CSS. Follow this link to check the stylesheets for validity.
   
3. All pages in this site have been written to be AA approved, with the WCAG 1.0 in mind and we believe that all priority 1, 2, and most of priority 3 guidelines have been met of the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0.
   
4. All pages on this site use structured semantic markup. h1 tags are used for page titles, h2 tags are used for main titles and h3 tags for subtitles. This means that JAWS users can skip to the next section within the accessibility page by pressing ALT+INSERT+3.
5. Please Note: This website uses a CMS to allow a greater number of people to upload pages to the website and also to pull content from other sites on the web, this means that compliance can be hampered by the content. If you notice that a page is no longer conforming please Contact Us to let us know and we will do our utmost to rectify the issue.

Navigation aids

1. All pages include a search box.
2. The site also contains a sitemap.

Links

1. Many links have title attributes which describe the link in greater detail, unless the text of the link already fully describes the target (such as the headline of an article).
2. All links are written to make sense out of context.

Images

1. All images used in this site include descriptive ALT attributes. There are no decorative graphics.
2. Complex images include LONGDESC attributes or inline descriptions to explain the significance of each image to non-visual readers.

Visual design

1. This site avoids using tables for visual layout and instead uses cascading style sheets.
2. This site uses only relative font sizes, compatible with the user-specified "text size" option in visual browsers.
3. If your browser or browsing device does not support stylesheets at all, the content of each page is still readable and logical.

Accessibility references

1. W3C accessibility guidelines. This explains the reasons behind each guideline.
2. W3C accessibility techniques. This explains how to implement each guideline.
3. W3C accessibility checklist. A handy checklist guide to accessibility.

Accessibility software

1. JAWS, a screen reader for Windows. A time-limited, downloadable demo is available.
2. Home Page Reader, a screen reader for Windows. A downloadable demo is available.
3. Lynx, a free text-only web browser for blind users with refreshable Braille displays.
4. Links, a free text-only web browser for visual users with low bandwidth.
5. Opera, a visual browser with many accessibility-related features, including text zooming, user stylesheets, image toggle. A free downloadable version is available. Compatible with Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and several other operating systems.

Accessibility services

1. Bobby, a free service to analyze web pages for compliance to accessibility guidelines. A full-featured commercial version is also available.
2. HTML Validator, a free service for checking that web pages conform to published HTML standards.
3. CSS Validator, a free service for checking that style sheets conform to published CSS standards.
4. Web Page Backward Compatibility Viewer, a tool for viewing your web pages without a variety of modern browser features.
5. Lynx Viewer, a free service for viewing what your web pages would look like in Lynx.

Related resources

1. WAI, The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) works with organizations around the world to develop strategies, guidelines, and resources to help make the Web accessible to people with disabilities.
2. WebAIM, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving accessibility to online learning materials.
3. Designing More Usable Web Sites, a large list of additional resources.
4. A list apart, large number a articles from some of the world's leading web design experts. Many of the accessibility and CSS articles were used to help build this site.
5. Dive Into Accessibility, 30 days to a more accessible web site.
6. Guild of Accessible Web Designers, GAWDS is a world-wide association of organisations and accessible web designers and developers - designed to both promote and protect standards - not technical standards - but accessible design standards.