About Accessibility on the Surrey Place Website
The Surrey Place website was designed to be as accessible as possible for the many diverse groups who may use it.
Surrey Place strives to achieve WCAG 2.0 single A or double AA rating, and to use industry best practices, including the following features:
Text Size
The Surrey Place website offers the ability to adjust text sizes according to your preference, making them larger or smaller. You can do this by clicking on the A-, A and A+ icons near the top right corner of any website page.
You can also change your text size preferences in your internet browser. For example, if you are using Internet Explorer 5, look under “View” on the menu bar and choose “Text Size.”
Contrast
The Surrey Place website has been built using high contrast colours to aid visibility.
Skip to content
The “Skip to Content” feature allows the user to skip over the repeated content at the beginning of many pages (such as the heading and navigation) and proceed to the main content on a page. This is especially useful to those with screen readers, giving the user a way to avoid listening through lengthy menus every time he or she visits a new page.
The “Skip to Content” link will be available on most website pages.
Alternative Text
Images on the Surrey Place website have alternative text attributes, often known as “alt text”. This means when an image is used on a web page its content is also described in the alt text. Thus, the image can be understood by text browsers and assistive technologies such as screen readers. If an image is used for simply decorative purposes, the text attribute for the image is left empty in line with accepted best practice.
Descriptive Links
Links on the Surrey Place website have TITLE tags. These tags work like Alternative Text and provide more information for someone using a screen reader or when someone hovers over a link with their mouse.
Colour Reliance and Image Alternatives
The Surrey Place website was created with colour impaired visitors in mind and designed and tested to conform to minimum contrast requirements for colour-blindness or other ocular impairments that could prevent visitors from reading text.
The Surrey Place website sometimes uses images for communication. Where website visitors cannot view images, alternative and descriptive text is provided to ensure that the content of those images is communicated, where necessary.
The Surrey Place website aims to not rely exclusively on colour or image to convey information.
Scripting Languages and Device Independence
The Surrey Place website uses standard web technologies and requires no special scripting languages or plug-in software to navigate or use.
Tables are Used for Tabular Data Only
The Surrey Place website does not use tables for style or layout. As per best practices, tables are only used to present information or data best viewed in column or row format.
Software You Might Need:
Some documents on the Surrey Place website are available in a PDF format and you will need Adobe Acrobat to open these files. Acrobat is available to download at no charge. Adobe also provides an excellent guide to using PDF documents.