In addition to the website accessibility benefits mentioned in this section, we have invested in the Recite overlay tool that makes it easy for users to
- have text read out loud,
- change text size, colours and font,
- provide a visual focus window to help concentration.
- selected text content on a page can also be downloaded as an MP3 file to listen to separately.
You can also find useful guidance on adjusting your laptop or phone to suit your need on these resources MyComputerMyWay or Scope guidance on phone accessibility features In addition, major operating systems produce the following guidance:
Visual aspects of the website
- The website pages reflow to fit the resolution and orientation of your device. We have tested this up to a zoom level of 400% on a wide sample of pages.
- On a laptop/PC browser, you can magnify text either by
- using the inbuilt browser zoom function - CTRL + (Windows) or CMD + (Mac).
- using the Recite toolbar, or
- increasing the default font size in your browser settings (or with browser plugins - for example A+ Font SizeChangerLite for Chrome)
Using a mix of both techniques can give fine-tuned viewing experiences.
- On a mobile device get magnification and reflow by changing the browser default font size and default display size in the accessibility settings menu.
- All PDFs sampled could be magnified and reflowed to fit the screen width in Adobe Reader using the inbuilt View>Zoom > Reflow functionality.
Personalising colours
- Pages have been designed so that users should be able to change font size and colours within the browser settings, using the Recite toolbar or using browser plug-ins like HighContrast.
Navigation
- Almost all downloadable PDFs could be efficiently browsed by a good heading structure in the bookmarks panel as well as a hyperlinked table of contents.
- The heading structure of most pages sampled is logical and hierarchical, allowing assistive technology users to navigate quickly to any part of the page – for example using a browser plugin like HeadingsMap or inbuilt screenreader functionality. Some pages (see sections below) have heading levels missing or reversed.
- All links will open in the same browser window, except for links to external websites.
- Most content can be accessed by keyboard-only actions, but this is not as easy as it should be.
Listening to content
All text content on pages content can be accessed by text to speech tools including
- The Recite text to speech feature,
- browser based plugins like Selection Reader for Chrome,
- clipboard readers like Orato and the ATBar,
- commercial text to speech tools.
Language
- Almost all pages have their language identified for screenreader users. The one exception noted in the sampling was online applications.
- The Recite toolbar allows users to translate the page into their preferred language.