Our accessibility strategy has a broader reach than the groups traditionally covered in the area of ‘accessibility’. Quite simply, we want to be as inclusive as we can. We therefore consider the needs of:

• People with visual, hearing or motor impairments;
• People with cognitive impairments;
• People with reading difficulties such as dyslexia;
• People from different cultural and socio-economic backgrounds;
• People from different generations.

Our aims New media technologies are always changing, but we are committed to the following broad principles:

• Providing help in using the site: offering Help and advice to guide users in customising their computers.
• Designing for use with assistive technologies: ensuring that our media work well with technologies such as software that reads pages aloud.
• Following standards: Ethos websites should comply with accessibility standards in commissioning, editorial, design and coding. These standards include the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI-A).
• Testing: we will be working with real users with different needs to ensure that any problems are identified and solutions developed. We’ve just launched this site, so testing is still underway.
• Innovating: looking for new ways of offering rich media in an accessible way and helping the development of technologies and standards for accessibility.

Guidelines

The accessibility guidelines we follow include:

• Allowing users to control text sizes.
• Using an easy to read font type.
• Ensuring suitable foreground and background colour contrast.
• Using clear and simple grammar.
• Providing meaningful text equivalents for pictures.
• Providing simple, consistent site navigation.
• Ensuring the target of each link is clearly defined.
• Providing a sitemap.
• Using appropriate structural mark-up to maximise browser support.

Contact us

Although we are testing this site on an ongoing basis, it’s your experience which counts, and we will try hard to solve problems as we become aware of them. So let us know if there are things you find difficult. And we would also be very happy to know if you have constructive feedback. Email us at info@ethos-is.com.