Accessibility Statement

The DASH website has been designed to be used on a variety of platforms, guided by Sandy Wassmer's The Ten Principles of Inclusive Web Design.

If you have any problems accessing the website please notify us.

The Ten Principles of Inclusive Web Design

Creating Beautiful, Usable & Accessible Websites

Inclusive Design is where innovation and imagination flourish. Meeting the needs of the widest variety of people does not inhibit creativity. It opens our minds and inspires excellence.

1. Equitable

Be welcoming, don't discriminate and engage with people. Create different user experiences and make certain they have equally valuable outcomes. Aesthetics matter.

2. Flexible

Provide options. Think who, how, why, what, where & when people will be using your website. Make sure there is choice for diverse users and maintain device independence.

3. Straightforward

Be obvious and not ambiguous. Make sure your website's features add value, not complexity. Remember, good design is as little design as possible.

4. Perceptible

Don't assume anything. Make sure your website's purpose is clear, its content, structure and sequence are meaningful and convey information to all of the senses.

5. Informative

Make sure people know where they are on your website and provide different ways for them to find what they're looking for. Be timely, predictable, uncomplicated and precise.

6. Preventative

Provide easy to follow instructions and gently guide users in interacting with your website. Help them to minimise errors when submitting data, through well considered form design.

7. Tolerant

Handle errors respectfully and indicate precisely what the error is, where it is and how to fix it. Remember to let people know the outcome.

8. Effortless

Don't make demands or place restrictions on your users. People should not have to work or think hard to find what they want on your website. Ensure it can be used efficiently and effectively.

9. Accommodating

Be approachable, uncluttered and give people room to manoeuvre. Make sure that your website is unobtrusive and can be accessed by different devices of all shapes and sizes.

10. Consistent

Follow standards, guidelines, conventions and best practices. Provide a familiar environment with memorable functionality.

Standards compliance

Our pages conform to a minimum to Level A compliance as specified by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and endorsed by the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB).

There are a couple issues raised by site scanners. Where we can, we are addressing these issues, which are minor.

The majority of Level AA and Level AAA requirements are also met. We strive to obey the spirit of the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) of 1995 with respect to the provision of services online.

Structured, semantic markup: Headings and navigation menus

HTML5 has been used and therefore HTML5 guidelines are used for headings (H1 tags are for 'section/article' titles so you may have more than one on a page, but all subsequent headings follow document structure on a section/article basis). Modern speech readers read HTML5 structured pages and as such allow easy jumping between header, navigation, sections, articles and asides.

Navigation menus are marked up as HTML lists. This ensures that the number of links in the list is read out at the start and it can be skipped easily.

Images

Unless they are purely decorative items, all images used on this web site have suitable alt attributes. - If you find any that are not suitable, please notify us.

Content should be usable/accessible with images "off" (disabled).

Links & Linking

Text has been written to make sense out of context.

Where appropriate, links have title attributes which describe the link in greater detail, for example to advise you if the link will open in a new window.

Colours

We have checked the site's font and background colour combinations against the different colour blindness conditions and ensured that all information is still clear. If you wish to override the site's colours, you can select a text only option.

Font sizes

You may change the font size to your preference using your browser.

If you wish to override the site's font settings, you can import your own style sheet.

Style sheets

This site uses Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for visual layout. If your browser does not support stylesheets, the use of structured semantic markup ensures that the content of each page is still readable and clearly structured.

If you wish, you may import your own stylesheet into this website:

In Internet Explorer select Tools, then Internet Options, and then Accessibility. Click on any or all of the three checkboxes to ignore colours, font styles or font sizes. In the same window you can change your style sheet by clicking the checkbox 'format document using my style sheet' then simply browse to your style sheet and click OK.

Visual design

This site uses cascading style sheets for visual layout.

If your browser or browsing device does not support stylesheets at all, the content of each page is still readable.

Any information conveyed through the use of colour is also available without colour (i.e. text based).