We are committed to ensuring our website is
accessible to everyone. If you have any questions or suggestions
regarding accessibility of this site, please use our contact form,
as we are continually striving to improve the experience for all
our visitors.
Standards Compliance
- All pages on this site follow priorities 1 & 2 guidelines
of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
- All pages on this site validate as XHTML 1.0 Strict.
- All pages on this site use structured semantic mark-up. H1 tags
are used for main titles, H2 tags for subtitles.
Structural Mark-up
Web pages on www.engc.org.uk include 4
different areas:
- A header section that contains the main site heading and
navigation,
- A main content area
- A "right Nav" column that contains supplementary information,
glossarys, document downloads and common links
- A footer.
When CSS (Cascading Styles Sheet) are not applied to a document
(or when using a screen reader), the 4 areas are read in the above
order.
Images
Unless they are purely decorative items, all images used on this
web site have suitable alt attributes.
Content should be usable/accessible with images "off"
(disabled).
The main navigation bar on this site uses an Image Replacement
technique that makes the links accessible to non-visual
browsers.
Links
Many links have title attributes which describe the link in
greater detail, unless the text of the link already fully describes
the target.
Links are written to make sense out of context.
URLs are permanent whenever possible.
Forms
All form controls are appropriately and explicitly labeled.
Scripts
We are using non obtrusive client-side scripts.
Content of this web site is usable without JavaScript
support.
Pop up Windows
In visual browsers, unless Javascript is disabled, a small icon
appears next to links to external resources.
Browsers with Popup Blockers should be able to access these
external documents.
Visual design
This site uses cascading style sheets for visual layout.
This site uses only relative font sizes, compatible with the
user-specified "text size" option in visual browsers.
If your browser or browsing device does not support stylesheets
at all, the content of each page is still readable.
Any information conveyed through the use of color is also
available without color (i.e. text based).
Accessibility references
W3 accessibility guidelines, which explains the reasons behind
each guideline.
W3 accessibility techniques, which explains how to implement each
guideline.
W3 accessibility checklist, a busy developer's guide to
accessibility.
U.S. Federal Government Section 508 accessibility guidelines.
Accessibility software
JAWS, a screen reader for Windows. A time-limited, downloadable
demo is available.
Home Page Reader, a screen reader for Windows. A downloadable demo
is available.
Lynx, a free text-only web browser for blind users with refreshable
Braille displays.
Links, a free text-only web browser for visual users with low
bandwidth.
Opera, a visual browser with many accessibility-related features,
including text zooming, user stylesheets, image toggle. A free
downloadable version is available. Compatible with Windows,
Macintosh, Linux, and several other operating systems.
Accessibility services
Bobby, a free service to analyze web pages for compliance to
accessibility guidelines. A full-featured commercial version is
also available.
HTML Validator, a free service for checking that web pages conform
to published HTML standards.
Web Page Backward Compatibility Viewer, a tool for viewing your web
pages without a variety of modern browser features.
Lynx Viewer, a free service for viewing what your web pages would
look like in Lynx.