Introduction

Making our site accessible is important to us. The National Forest website has been designed with accessibility in mind. As far as is possible, we try to ensure that it operates across multiple platforms and browsers and is accessible to everyone who wants to use it.

Standards compliance

• All pages on the site, unless otherwise stated, are Bobby AAA approved, complying with all priority 1, 2, and 3 guidelines of the W3 Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
• All pages on the site, unless otherwise stated, are validated as HTML 4.01 Transitional.

Links

• Wherever possible, links are written to make sense out of context. Many browsers (such as JAWS, Home Page Reader, Lynx, and Opera) can extract the list of links on a page and allow the user to browse the list, separately from the page.
• Link text is never duplicated; two links with the same link text always point to the same address.
• There are no links that open new windows without warning.

Images

This website utilises two distinct image types;

• Content images used include descriptive ALT attributes.
• Decorative images include short ALT attributes.

Accessibility software

• JAWS, a screen reader for Windows. A time-limited, 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 analyse web pages for compliance to accessibility guidelines. A full-featured commercial version is also available.
• W3C HTML Validator, a free service for checking that web pages conform to published HTML standards.
• Lynx Viewer, a free service for viewing what your web pages would look like in Lynx.

Access Keys

The main navigation of the site has designed so that users can use Access Keys. Access Keys are keyboard shortcut keys which enable users to access areas of the Web site using the assigned character on the keyboard rather than using a mouse to click on links, buttons etc. Find out more about using Access Keys

If you would like further information or if you are experiencing any problems whilst using our site, contact us on 01283 551211. Alternately you can fill out a contact form on this website.