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Accessibility
Accessibility and the Wirral website
The current Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) requires that goods and services are offered on equal terms to people with disabilities. Wirral Council is committed to providing its online services to all sections of the public. Our website is being designed to follow the accessibility guidelines issued by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Royal National Institute of the Blind (RNIB).
No use of frames (some speech synthesizers get confused when finding html documents with framesets). Use of Alternative text to describe the content of a picture. This is useful for text-based browsers and/or for users with visual impairments. Links to the Adobe Acrobat Access reader for PDF Adobe Acrobat files.
Increased contrast between background and text for readability purposes. Ensuring that fields in online forms can be navigated with pressing 'Tab' in a keyboard. This is particularly meaningful to users that cannot use a pointer device such as the mouse, whether this is for mobility reasons or for visual impairments.
Avoidance of certain colour combinations that may result in not seeing whatever is displayed due to colour blindness. According to the Royal National Institute of the Blind, one in five males in Britain suffer some form of colour blindness (knowingly or unknowingly).
As bandwidth increases and the possibility of streaming video becomes more of a reality, we are studying the feasibility of adding captions (subtitles) to our videos. This is meaningful to users with hearing difficulties as well as useful for those users whose first language is not English.
For those whose concentration may not be kept for too long in a piece of information (for instance individuals with learning disabilities) information has been chunked and reduced where possible, grouping relevant information and displaying it in different pages for a better understanding.