Accessibility

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Accessibility is important to us here at Newham and our website is no exception. We are committed to ensuring that the service is accessible to everyone and to offering a positive user experience. By following a set of guidelines offered by the Web Accessibility Initiative, our website generally conforms to a AA rating where HTML is used. Here we detail how this has been achieved:

Language and Layout

This site's layout takes into account users who are visually impaired or have difficulties using a mouse and is designed to be compatible with screen reading software such as JAWS and Homepage Reader for Windows. It also has been designed to work properly over a range of screen resolutions and browsers.

The site content is also written in plain English and in a style that is straightforward and easy to understand.

Some users might find screen text easier to read by increasing the size at which text is displayed. This can be done by using the text control icons at the top of every page. Simply click on the larger A to increase the text size or the smaller A to reduce its size.

Alternately, you can change the size of text by holding down the ctrl key on the bottom row of the keyboard, whilst moving the scroll wheel on the mouse up or down.

Colour

We have not used colour to highlight important information within text and have taken care to ensure that there is a sufficient contrast between the foreground and background colour combinations.

However if you have difficulty reading the content of the site, you can reverse the contrast so that that light coloured text appears on a dark background. To do this click on the contrast options in the top right corner of every page.

Images

All images have been given a text equivalent to provide a meaningful explanation of what the image is about. The description can be read by hovering the cursor over the image or read aloud if you are using a screen reader to browse the webpage rather than view.

Links

Hyperlinks are highlighted using descriptive and meaningful text rather than instructions to 'click here' or 'download now'. A link to an external website will also open up in a new browser window.

PDFs

Many of our reports and documents on the website are in Portable Document Format (PDF), which can only be read by using a software such as Adobe Reader. If you do not have Adobe Reader, you can download it for free from the Adobe website.

PDFs are not easily accessible to all users so Adobe has developed a method of converting PDF documents into HTML, which is a more accessible format for assistive technologies such as screen readers. Visit Adobe's 'Online conversion tools for Adobe PDF documents' page for more information.