Accessibility

At Prater Raines, we believe it is important that online content is accessible to everyone including the visually impaired and the disabled.

We are experienced at building web sites which are accessible by design. When you commission us to design a web site or develop an application, we will discuss how to reconcile meeting accessibility guidelines with your business model. We can also provide consultancy on this issue.

Accessibility on this web site

This web site is designed to be as accessible as possible. Some of the techniques we followed are described here.

• The site content is marked up semantically and the design is written separately. The site is therefore meaningful on older software which does not support style sheets and on screen reading software for the blind and visually impaired.
• The content is written in correct, simple English. Explanations of industry-specific terminology and abbreviations are provided.
• All the links on this site are underlined. Visited links are purple and unvisited links are blue. This standard design makes it easy for visitors to find links to pages they have not yet read.
• Link and heading text is carefully considered to make sense out of context, since some screen reading software can read this information separately from the rest of the page. This also encourages browsing.
• Neighbouring colours have sufficient contrast to be legible on black and white displays and by people with poor eyesight or colour blindness.
• The navigation is consistent across the site. The drop down menus respond to keyboard focus as well as mouse movements and are displayed in full on older software which does not support scripting and on screen readers.

If you would like to discuss the accessibility of this web site further, please email our Technical Director.

Access keys

Many browsers support jumping to specific web pages based on keypresses. This web site defines the following access keys:

• on Firefox, use Alt + Shift + an access key;
• on Internet Explorer, use Alt + an access key;
• on Safari, use Control + an access key.

S

Skip navigation (takes you straight to the content on the current page);

1

Home page;

3

Site map (table of contents);

7

Complaints procedure (privacy policy);

8

Terms and conditions;

0

Access key details (this page).

Conformance

• This web site conforms to the Web Accessibility Initiative's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, level AAA.
• You can access important links on this site using the keyboard. The site uses the UK Government access keys standard.
• All the web pages on this site are written in valid XHTML 1.0. You can test this using the W3C's HTML validator.
• The design of this site is written in valid CSS. You can test this using the W3C's CSS validator.