Accessibility
ABTA Lifeline is committed to making its website available to as many people as possible meeting the requirements of the Disability Discrimination Act and makes every effort to ensure its communications are accessible to those with special needs, including those with visual, hearing, cognitive and motor impairments.
Many internet users can find websites difficult to use due to the way they have been designed.
We recognise that this is an important issue and are making changes to ensure that the abtalifeline.org.uk website is accessible in accordance with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) guidelines.
We have strived to make this website adhere to priority 1 and 2 guidelines of the W3 Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and in some cases priority 3.
Changes to improve accessibility are ongoing, but if you come across a page you find difficult to use please let us know.
The code used to create the site validates as HTML 5. The pages use structured semantic markup.
Standards compliance
Our pages conform to Level AA compliance as specified by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 and endorsed by the Royal National Institute for the Blind.
We strive to obey the spirit of the UK Disability Discrimination Act 1995 with respect to the provision of services online, as required by the Disability Rights Commission.
Changes to improve accessibility are ongoing, but if you come across a page you find difficult to use please let us know.
Accessibility design
Many internet users with disabilities find website difficult or even impossible to use simply because of the way they are designed.
This website has been designed to be as accessible as possible and to be compatible with the types of adaptive technology used by people with disabilities, including screen readers.
Foreground and background colours contrast well throughout the site, with the majority of content appearing black on white.
The site is free of frames and uses cascading style sheets for visual layout. Tables are used for tabular data, but we have avoided using them to dictate the layout of a page wherever possible.
Links
External website links on the site will open a new browser window and most links have title attributes, which describe the link in greater detail, and in the majority of cases the text of the link already fully describes the target.
Wherever possible, links are written to make sense out of context.
Link text is never duplicated. Two links on the same page with the same link text always point to the same address. External links on the site will open a new browser window (when the link target is on a non ABTA Lifeline website). New windows are never opened without either a warning in the text or in the 'title' attribute of the link.
Images
All content images on the site include descriptive ALT attributes. Those purely decorative graphics or used for layout include empty ALT attributes.
PDFs
Most documents on this website are PDFs (portable document format). The advantage of a PDF is that it will always be presented consistently. You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader to open PDF files, and this can be downloaded for free. Adobe has recently updated its free reader to include screenreading functionality.
Adobe also has a free online conversion tool for pdfs so people who have problems reading PDFs can convert them so that they appear as normal web pages or plain text.
JavaScript
The site has been configured to allow users access to its full range of functionality whether or not they have JavaScript enabled in their browsers. Where JavaScript is used, it is only used to enhance the user experience. It is never essential.