Accessibility Policy for What Scotland Thinks

In keeping with our commitment to making research findings available to all and our obligations under the DDA (Disability Discrimination Act), we will ensure that our website is accessible to people who have visual, hearing, motor or cognitive impairments.

As a standard, we employ all the following methods to ensure our site is accessible to as many people as possible:

• Browsealoud is available to ensure that all pages can be read out loud to any visitor
• All pictures and data visualisations have an alternative text description
• There is an easy to use text-resiser on all pages for those with javascript enabled on their computers. Our stylesheets allow for text resizing using the View – Text Size option in the browser toolbar for those who do not have javascript enabled.
• The website can be viewed using a variety of colour schemes ensuring it can be used by visitors who find the existing colour scheme hard to read
• We are committed to Plain English in all our written content
• Our site has been designed without the use of tables except where we need to represent normally tabulated content
• The website can be navigated without the use of a mouse
• A non-serif font is used for easier readability
• We do not use all-capitals for emphasis
• We use a hierarchy of heading markups i.e an h1 tag for main headings, h2 for secondary headings etc which makes it easier for screen readers to work out the structure of a page
• Our site can be viewed in a logical order when all styling is turned off Helping you make your computer easier to use

To find out more about making your computer more accessible and easy to use, have a look at AbilityNet’s website. They have a range of tips and suggestions relating to accessibility issues.

If there is an instance when our site does not meet the need of a specific disabled user group we will make changes to our current content, wherever appropriate, so that we can become more inclusive to a wider audience. Please contact us if this is the case on info@whatscotlandthinks.org