Accessibility

At the Cruden Group, we're committed to making our site accessible to all users and support the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). Our site content has been designed to meet the WAI recommendations and we are continually addressing additional requirements. If you have encountered any issues with the accessibility of this site, we would be grateful if you could let us know so we can use this information to continue to improve the usability of the website.

Links and skip links

Many links have title attributes which describe the destination of the link in greater detail, unless the text of the link already fully describes the target (such as the headline of an article). Links are written to make sense when read out of context. For the benefit of the visually impaired, a number of hidden 'skip' links are embedded into each page to aid navigation. These links are hidden in a standard web browser but will be read aloud by text reading software. From the main page users can navigate to the main content area or stylesheet switcher and from the bottom of the page, users can navigate to the main content area or main navigation.

Images and visual design

All images, with the exception of background images and images inserted via server sided code, used in this site include descriptive ALT attributes. This site uses cascading style sheets for visual layout and only uses relative font sizes, compatible with the user-specified 'text-size' option in visual browsers. If your browser or browsing device does not support stylesheets at all, the content of each page is still readable.

The site should be readable in a text only browser/browser with CSS support disabled.Most text can be enlarged by using your browser's text sizing options.

The colours are all specified in CSS so you can use your own styles should you find this easier to read.All forms follow a logical tab sequence and labels are associated with fields using HTML label tags.

Scripting

While JavaScript is used on this site to improve usability, all pages and processes, except those hosted by third parties, are still accessible and usable if JavaScript is not available.

Standards compliance

Our pages conform as 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). We aim to comply with the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) of 1995 with respect to the provision of services online, as required by the Disability Rights Commission (DRC).

Accessibility References

W3 accessibility guidelines, which explains the reasons behind each guideline.
W3 accessibility techniques, which explains how to implement each guideline.
W3 accessibility checklist, a busy developer's guide to accessibility.