Accessibility
Find out how we have made our website easy to
use for people who use services and their families and
friends.
Need help? Change this
site to meet your needs.
An award-winning website
Our website won an award for accessibility at the
New Statesman New Media Awards 2006.
Find out more about our accessibility
award.
We also made the final for three other awards:
- Chartered Institute of Public Relations
Excellence
- e-Government National Awards
- British Interactive Media Association
(BIMA) Awards.
Meeting the guidelines – and beyond
We have designed our website to meet level AA of the
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) guidelines.
This makes it accessible to many disabled people who use
computer programs and equipment to help them use websites.
The charity RNIB checked our website against
the WC3 guidelines and their own accessibility standards.
They awarded us their See It Right logo in
recognition that we've met the standards.
Our commitment to best practice website accessibility goes
beyond just meeting the guidelines. Read on to find out
more.
Involving disabled people and older people
An important part of making any website accessible is to involve
disabled people and older people in the design process.
We involved many people in the design of our website,
including:
- people over the age of 70
- people with a physical disability
- people with a learning disability
- people with mental health problems.
We also involved many family, friends and carers of people who
use care services.
By asking people to try out early versions of the website we
were able to iron out problems before launching the new site.
Making it easy to read
We worked with the learning disability charity
Mencap to create easy to read pages for people
with a learning disability.
These pages will also help other people who find it difficult to
read and people who don't have English as their first language.
The easy to read pages include
pictures to help back up the meaning of the words.
Adding sound to the website
The easy to read pages also have specially recorded sound to
help people who find it difficult to read.
And we have registered our website with
Browsealoud.
This means anyone who downloads the free Browsealoud program can
use it to read out all the words on our website.
Writing in plain English
We have used plain English on every page of our website.
By using straightforward, short sentences and easy to understand
words we hope the information will be accessible to everyone.
The Plain English Campaign checked our website
for plain English and to make sure it follows good practice
guidelines.
They awarded us their Plain English Internet Crystal
Mark in recognition that we've used plain English and our
website is easy to use.
Information in other languages
We have translated important information about how to choose a
social care service into nine languages other
than English.
We chose these languages because they are the ones we have the
most requests for from people who use services and their
families.
Our accessible communications policy
We launched our accessible communications policy in 2006. It
aims to enable disabled people, and those who don't speak English
as their first language, to access our information in a way that
suits their needs.
Tell us what you think
We've tried very hard to make our website as easy to use as
possible. But we know that it's an ongoing job.
- Please contact us if you have any
comments or suggestions on how we can make improvements.