Accessibility statement

What is accessibility?

Broadly speaking, online accessibility is about making web content available to as many users, using as many technologies, as possible. The WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines - now in version 2.0) is a set of guidelines developed by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) specifically to improve online accessibility, and, as evidenced by the following quotation from the guidelines' abstract, is targeted primarily to improve access for people with disabilities, while noting that doing so is likely to improve access to a wider group of users.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 covers a wide range of recommendations for making Web content more accessible. Following these guidelines will make content accessible to a wider range of people with disabilities, including blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, learning disabilities, cognitive limitations, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity and combinations of these. Following these guidelines will also often make your Web content more usable to users in general.

A brief history

Online accessibility has proven a contentious area for developers and users of online content alike. WCAG 1.0, which moved to W3C 'Recommendation' status in 1999, received a lot of criticism due to its use of technology-specific concepts, which quickly became outdated as technologies developed. Users of assistive technologies such as screen-reading software, have also complained that supposedly accessible content, developed using what was regarded in many quarters as best practice, can actually be quite annoying to navigate.

Online accessibility issues moved further into the public consciousness when a user of the official Sydney Olympic Games website lodged a complaint with Australia's Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC), on the basis that (among other points) the organisers failed to provide a website that was accessible to him, as a blind person. The end result was that SOCOG was ordered to pay the complainant $20,000 in compensation.

WCAG 2.0 received 'Recommendation' status in December 2008 after many years of work to improve upon the version 1 guidelines, and has reopened debates about accessibility - the concepts, the finer points, and unfortunately even the personalities of the champions of different viewpoints.

Our website

As a key provider of services to people with disabilities, we welcome any effort to raise the profile of accessibility issues. Our own approach is what we believe is a 'commonsense approach' to interpreting and applying the guidelines. In short, we believe our site complies with WCAG 2.0 AA level, and that it actually sits much closer to the maximum AAA level. You can read the guidelines here.

To you, the visitor to our site, what this means is that our site:

allows you to resize text;
allows you to opt for a simple layout alternative;
provides 'skip links' to navigate past repeated content;
includes an overall sitemap;
provides tables of contents on more complex pages to improve ease of navigation;
uses high-contrast colour schemes to make content more easily visible;
provides alternative text where appropriate;
is navigable using a keyboard only;
accommodates viewing in a range of window sizes;
has an underlying structure of a document, not just a visual layout; and,
closely related to document structure, uses valid code to ensure that it remains interpretable by a wide range of technologies.

Testing

Every page of the site has been tested and passed for valid syntax using the W3C's code validation tools. Valid code is important because assistive technologies such as screen-readers or braille pads rely on the underlying code, not the nice-looking end result, to present content to disabled users. Common browsers like Firefox and Internet Explorer do a very good job of presenting poorly-coded web pages so that they can at least be viewed, and this flexibility has had the negative side effect of 'lowering the bar' on web standards. Many websites claim conformance to coding standards but actually fail validation - most likely due to the original code being left in an invalid state by subsequent updates, since a single character in the wrong place of the code is enough to render the page's code invalid.

As with many websites, you can test the validity of code on pages in our website simply by clicking on the conformance statements. In our case, the conformance claims are made via blue icons in the page footer, which have alternate text of Click to validate this page as XHTML 1.0 Strict and Click to validate this page's CSS. We encourage you to test any sites (including ours) that you would consider an important resource. You can also test a web page by entering the page's address directly into the W3C validator. It's quite possible that web pages that fail validation do not, as a result, even meet WCAG 2.0 Level A (the lowest level). If you happen to find any pages on our site that don't conform as stated, please contact us to let us know.

Every page of the site has also been tested with 'WAVE', an automated accessibility testing tool (available at no cost from the Web Accessibility In Mind website) to identify and address accessibility issues where appropriate.

Most importantly, the site has also had valuable testing and input from users with disabilities.

Our approach

An example of the 'commonsense' approach we've applied can be seen in the banner used in the site. The banner features photographs of a wide range of people, and is intended to demonstrate that we provide services to a wide range of people. Winding across those photos is the text (which is actually embedded in the image) Working to protect your rights, a motto we use. WCAG 2.0 specifies in guideline 1.4.9 that to achieve level AAA (highest) compliance, images of text are only used for pure decoration or where a particular presentation of text is essential to the information being conveyed. Whether or not a banner is pure decoration or not is a fine point. We hope that ours is not - it is intended to subtly convey the idea to visitors that we serve a wide range of people in the community and that we work to protect their rights. As such, on a strict reading of this guideline, our use of image-based text in the banner results in all our pages which feature the banner failing AAA compliance on this point. The guideline does allow for image-based text in a logo, but this arguably isn't a logo, it's a banner developed specifically for the website.

The alternatives to such a layout, which would satisfy the guideline in question, could be:

To use actual text instead of image-based text. The problem here is that plain text could actually become less readable to sighted users than the image text that has been specifically designed to work with the image. The subtlety of the message would also be removed - on every page, those users using a screenreader, for example, would hear working to protect your rights every time they went to a new page, which could quickly become annoying.
To eliminate the text altogether. While this would satisfy the guideline, it would seem to be a regressive step rather than an improvement. The guidelines are intended to improve the accessibility of content, not to remove content because it's inaccessible.

Instead, our approach has been to leave the image-based text in place as a subtle reminder which sighted users can choose to engage with or to ignore, and on the home page of the site, the banner includes alternate text (which can be read by assistive technology) with the words working to protect your rights. This ensures that non-sighted users hear this message at least once, without it becoming a source of constant annoyance on every page. The motto is also included as the first piece of textual content on the home page, which means that users with visual impairments have the opportunity to manipulate the font characteristics where their technology of choice allows it.

Whether this approach would be considered AAA compliance could arguably only be answered by the authors of WCAG 2.0, but we believe it represents a positive, commonsense approach, which we have applied to various elements of the site.

Another example is that Australia's HREOC has taken the official stance that:

...organisations who distribute content only in PDF format, and who do not also make this content available in another format such as RTF, HTML, or plain text, are liable for complaints under the DDA.

While our developer disagrees with some of the logic behind this stance, responses from users with a disability who tested our site indicated that if given a choice between a PDF document and another format, the PDF version was not even accessed. As a result, we are now redeveloping our PDF documents into alternative formats.

In summary, we're not perfect, and in line with our efforts to improve the accessibility of the site we hope that if you, as a site visitor, believe we have not complied with a guideline that is important to you, or simply have a suggestion for improvement, you will kindly contact us and let us know.

Resizing text

Many web browsers have built-in functions for resizing text. We have outlined these browser-based techniques below, as well as providing an in-page function for achieving the same thing.

On-page text resizing

On all pages in our site, you can use the two font sizing buttons to increase and decrease the font size. The buttons are located with the other accessibility tools such as the 'skip to' links, at the top right of the page, between the page banner and the navigation menu. The buttons are an image of a page with the letter 'A' on them, in large and small font, with accompanying alternative text.

Any change you make to a page's font size will be applied to all pages in the site, provided cookies are enabled in your browser. If you prefer to not use cookies, you may like to use browser-based text resizing.

Browser font sizing

This section gives brief detail on how to activate browser-based text resizing in some common and emerging browsers. Please note that the following instructions are based on PC (not Mac) systems. You may need to consult your browser's help menu for full details for your particular environment.

Firefox: Frefox calls its text resizing options 'zoom'. Zoom in and zoom out options are available by navigating to the 'View' menu, then the 'Zoom' submenu. Alternatively, you can use shortcut keys. Pushing and holding the Control key while tapping the Plus symbol key will zoom in (Ctrl + +), while pushing and holding the Control key while tapping the Minus symbol key will zoom out (Ctrl + -).
Internet Explorer 6: You can choose from a range of text sizes by navigating to the 'View' menu, then the 'Text size' submenu.
Internet Explorer 7: In addition to the techniques applicable to Internet Explorer 6, the 'Text size' options are also available from the 'Page' button on the Internet Explorer 7 command bar. There is also a 'Zoom' function available from the 'Page' button, which literally zooms in on the page and enlarges all content, not just the text. The zoom function can be used with shortcut keys. Pushing and holding the Control key while tapping the Plus symbol key will zoom in (Ctrl + +), while pushing and holding the Control key while tapping the Minus symbol key will zoom out (Ctrl + -).
Internet Explorer 8: As for Internet Explorer 7, except the 'Zoom' option is also available from the 'View' menu in Internet Explorer 8
Safari: Safari uses 'zoom' to zoom everything, or just text. The options are available through the 'View' menu (you may need to press your 'Alt' keyboard key to see the menu). The options are also available through the page toolbar button, under the 'Zoom' submenu. Alternatively, you can use shortcut keys. Pushing and holding the Control key while tapping the Plus symbol key will zoom in (Ctrl + +), while pushing and holding the Control key while tapping the Minus symbol key will zoom out (Ctrl + -). Pushing and holding the Control key while tapping the zero key will return zoom to the standard size (Ctrl + 0). By default, the zoom functions will enlarge text and graphics, not just the text. You can 'toggle' this setting by using the 'Zoom Text Only' setting in the View menu, or the shortcut keys Alt + v,e (press and hold the Alt key, then press the 'v' key, then press the 'e' key).
Chrome: You can zoom everything in Chrome from the options under the 'Zoom' submenu in the page toolbar button. Alternatively, you can use shortcut keys. Pushing and holding the Control key while tapping the Plus symbol key will zoom in (Ctrl + +), while pushing and holding the Control key while tapping the Minus symbol key will zoom out (Ctrl + -). Pushing and holding the Control key while tapping the zero key will return zoom to the standard size (Ctrl + 0).