This snapshot, taken on
18/01/2011
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Accessibility

We want a website that works for everyone, so we focus on listening to our users about what works and what doesn’t.

CABE works very hard to improve issues of access and inclusion in the built environment and the development of our website reflects these concerns. 

Our approach

We take our responsibility to our users very seriously and always want to hear your views about what we’re doing. While we cannot guarantee that we will take every concern into account immediately, we will work to include the issues raised in ongoing reviews and updates to our site.

What we do

We are working to implement the recommendations of our independent accessibility audit.  These include:

  • better treatment of browsing through the tab key, including a "skip to main content" link
  • improved labelling of form elements
  • more logical and ordered heading structure
  • cleaner markup of images that are links
  • a new approach to describing the content of images using Alt text (see below).

We write our content in plain, clear English which is appropriate to our subject matter.

We describe all images appropriately using Alt text for those using assistive software or text browsers. However, we are moving towards NOT describing images unless they contain textual or diagrammatic information.  This is a direct result of recommendations from our accessibility auditors and we would love to hear what you think about this point.

We pay attention to good contrast and, particularly, legibility. Our site is designed to be easy to read through our use of colour and typography.

We comply with web standards in all our websites, except in specific cases where we feel that not doing so provides a better experience for all users. This includes using semantically meaningful mark-up that can be understood by assistive software.

Our site can be resized in all modern browsers, giving control over the site’s appearance to our users.

We always provide alternative ways of accessing information contained in videos.  Currently we provide full transcripts of all speech but we are also investigating subtitles and closed captioning.

We use Javascript as little as possible and where we use it we always provide a working alternative for those with Javascript turned off. We only AJAX where there is no alternative.

What we don't do

We do not provide any translation services for our web content.