Accessibility
Children's Hospice South West recognises the importance of providing a website that is accessible to all user groups. To that end we are committed to providing a website that is accessible to the widest audience possible, including people with visual, hearing, cognitive or motor impairments.
Web Accessibility Initiative
The website follows the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Maintaining an accessible site is an ongoing process and we are continually working to provide the most inclusive experience we can.
There are also some very simple services already built in to your computer that will help make it easier to access the information you want on our website.
Help with seeing the page
You can easily make changes in your computer to help you see what's written on the page more clearly.
Most Internet browsers, such as Internet Explorer or Safari, allow you to force the text on a web page to be the size and colour you want.
Many operating systems also come with a built-in screen magnifier that allows you to enlarge a portion of the page to several times the original size.
We have created some instructions for common browsers for MS Windows and MAC OS users:-
- To change the text size click here.
- To change the text colour click here.
- To use the built-in screen magnifier click here.
Fonts to help people with dyslexia
There are free downloadable fonts available including Dyslexie and OpenDyslexic to help users with dyslexia or dyslexia-related issues. These can make our site easier to use.
Help with your keyboard and mouse
Many people think that they can not use a computer because they are unable to use a mouse. But you can operate a computer using the keyboard alone by the use of keyboard short cut key. In fact, it can be easier and quicker to do this, rather than using the mouse.
Or, if you would still prefer to use a mouse but find it a bit difficult to do so, you are able to slow the mouse speed, responsiveness and click speed.
We have provided some instructions in the links below to help you:
Document downloads
Many of the documents on this website are forms or publications created in Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format (PDF). Adobe Reader enables you to read PDFs. The latest versions of Adobe Reader offer more in the way of accessibility than earlier versions.
For documents provided in PDF or Word document format, you may need to install some free software:
If you can't open PDF documents, download the latest Adobe Reader software.
If you can't open Word documents, download the latest Word viewer software.
Content pulled in from social media, such as Twitter and Facebook
In some parts of our site, we display content that has been pulled in from social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook. These sites often restrict the ways in which content can be displayed, and sometimes this means it is not as accessible as we would like. We try to keep these to a minimum and provide alternative content.
Third party applications
The site uses applications from third party suppliers such as Worldpay and AddThis for social sharing, which may have elements that are not accessible to all users. We will continue to regularly monitor any changes these suppliers roll out to their applications and, where possible, update them to be as accessible as possible. However, users may encounter accessibilty problems when using third party applications and unfortunately CHSW has no influence over the accessibility standards that updates and improvements to these third party applications adhere to.
Links
Many links have title attributes that describe the link in greater detail, unless the text of the link already fully describes the target (such as the headline of an article). Links are written to make sense of context.
Images
All content images used in this site include descriptive ALT attributes. Purely decorative graphics include null ALT attributes.
Alternative to video
Unfortunately we do not have the resources at present to provide transcripts and audio descriptions for video content.
Browser upgrades
We have tried to make our website compatible with all browsers. However, if you are using an older browser, our pages may not be presented in the best possible way. It may help you to download a newer version of a browser.
The following are available to download for free, which may help:
Mozilla Firefox Google Chrome Safari Internet Explorer Opera
Areas we are still working on
While this website strives to adhere to the accepted guidelines and standards for accessibility and usability, it is not always possible to do so in all areas of the website.
The specific areas where we are currently working to achieve better accessibility are:
- Provision of video and audio transcripts
- Provision of audio captions
- Provision of audio descriptions
- Alt text for images doesn’t include information on where the user will be taken, just what the image depicts
- We sometimes show third party content and we're working with these suppliers to make this content accessible in the future
We are continually seeking out solutions that will bring all areas of the site up to the same level of overall web accessibility. In the meantime should you experience any difficulty in accessing our website please contact us.
Other help available
We hope that these pages have been able to give you some help in accessing the information on our site more easily. But if you have issues that we haven't been able to cover here, we have listed below some other websites that are dedicated to helping people to adjust their computer in order to get the most out of it.
AbilityNet
The charity AbilityNet has put together a website that will help you to customise your computer and the way you view websites in even more ways, so that you really can get the most out of your computer.
BBC's My Web My Way
The BBC also has a very comprehensive site called My Web My Way developed in association with AbilityNet, which goes into even more detail on how you can adjust your computer so that you can make the most of the world-wide web.
Helpful links
If you need more information and guidance on using the web and your computer, we have provided some useful links to help (the following links will all open in a new browser window):
W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) Better Web Browsing Guide
BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) My Web, My Way
JAWS: a time-limited demonstration version of this Windows screen reader software
Lynx: a free text-only web browser
Feedback
We strive to adhere to the accepted guidelines and standards for accessibility and usability, but it is not always possible to do so in all areas of the website. We are continually working to improve the accessibility and usability of the website, but if you have any suggestions or are experiencing any difficulties downloading files or accessing a particular page please contact us.