We want everyone to be able to use our website. 

Learning Disability Wales has aimed to make this website accessible and usable for people of all abilities, including those with visual, hearing, cognitive or motor impairments. Our website is designed to support assistive technologies so Learning Disability Wales can be accessed as spoken text, or to navigate around a site using the keyboard only.

We also consider the user experience – how easy to read is the text? How easy is it to navigate around the site and understand where you are?

Standards compliance

The pages on this website were built to comply with a minimum standard of WCAG A, complying with all priority 1 and 2 guidelines of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. All pages on this site validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional. All pages on this site use structured semantic markup. H1 tags are used for main titles, H2, H3 and H4 tags for subtitles. JAWS users can skip to the next section within pages on this website by pressing ALT+INSERT+3.

Navigation aids

All pages contain a link to the home page, and the menu system has been constructed in a consistent fashion throughout the website. The additional breadcrumb navigation system and selective quick links boxes are designed to reinforce awareness of the location of the page that is being viewed within the website, and to increase overall access to all of the information that is available.

All pages on the website include a search box (access key 4), and advanced search options are available on the advanced search page.

Links

Many links have title attributes, which describe the link in greater detail. Links are written to make sense out of context.

Images

All content images used in this site include descriptive ALT attributes. Purely decorative graphics include null ALT attributes. Complex images include LONGDESC attributes or in-line descriptions to explain the significance of each image to non-visual readers.

Fonts

This site uses only relative font sizes, compatible with the user-specified “text size” option in visual browsers. Internet Explorer provides a straightforward way to increase font size via style sheets. To do so, open IE, select ‘Tools’ from the menu bar and then select Internet Options. Next select ‘Accessibility’ and check Ignore font sizes specified on webpages. Click ‘OK’, and then close the Internet Options window. Select ‘View’ from the menu bar, choose ‘Text Size’ and select from ‘Smallest to Largest’.

Keyboard shortcuts

The following keyboard shortcuts control text size:

  • Press Ctrl & + (plus sign) to increase the text size.
  • Press Ctrl & – (minus sign) to decrease the text size.
  • Press Ctrl & 0 (zero) to reset the text size to the webpage’s default size.

Mozilla Firefox allows you to temporarily change the size of text on any webpage in the View > Zoom menu, with Zoom Text Only enabled.

The following keyboard shortcuts control text size:

  • Press Ctrl & + (plus sign) to increase the text size.
  • Press Ctrl & – (minus sign) to decrease the text size.
  • Press Ctrl & 0 (zero) to reset the text size to the webpage’s default size.

For Mac users the following keyboard shortcuts control text size:

  • Press Command & + (plus sign) to increase the text size.
  • Press Command & – (minus sign) to decrease the text size.
  • Press Command & 0 (zero) to reset the text size to the webpage’s default size.

In all instances this will cause horizontal scrolling on the page. This can be navigated via the left and right arrow keys on your keyboard.

Access keys

The UK Government Access Keys Standard has been applied to this site. These provide a keyboard shortcut for users wishing to go directly to specific parts of the site and help those who do not use a pointing device, such as a mouse. A subset of the standard has been used and the access keys are defined as follows:

  • S – Skip navigation
  • 1 – Home page
  • 3 – Site map
  • 4 – Search this site
  • 0 – Accessibility statement

How to use access keys

Access keys work slightly differently depending on which browser and type of computer you are using – this is a summary of the main different ways:

  • If you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 on a PC, press ‘alt’ and the access key character at same time
  • If you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 on a PC, press ‘alt’ and the access key character at the same time, then press the enter key
  • If you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 on an Apple Macintosh, press ‘control’ and the access key character at the same time
  • This accessibility initiative is also supported by Netscape 6; use the ‘alt’ key on a PC, or the ‘ctrl’ key on an Apple Macintosh

Our promise

We are committed to making our website accessible to all people, regardless of ability. We will continue to closely monitor developments and changes in WAI guidelines and general website best practice.

If you have any feedback or suggestions on how we can make this website more accessible for your needs or the needs of the community, please contact the team at: enquiries@ldw.org.uk