Accessibility

Accessibility is about providing equal opportunities for accessing a website to everyone, according to the Terms of Use for www.fsdc.org.uk. This includes children and adults who may have visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive or neurological disabilities
for Scotland’s Disabled Children is committed to producing an accessible website:

• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
• Web-friendly text
• Plain text view
• Alternative text for images
• Printer-friendly pages
• Fast page download
• Easy to read content
• User testing
• Tell us what you think

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines

We seek to meet the Priority A and AA guidelines of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. We test our website using automated tools and manual testing.

Web-friendly text

The font we use is easy to read on screen but narrow enough so that you don't have to scroll down too much. We avoid using unnecessary italics or capital letters. You can increase or decrease the size of the text on the website using your web browser:

Internet Explorer 7 and 8

Select "Text size" from the "Page" menu and choose your size.

Internet Explorer 6 and Firefox 2

Select "Text size" from the "View" menu and choose your size.

Firefox 3

Go to "Zoom" on the "View" menu. If "Zoom text only" is not ticked, select it. Then choose "Zoom in" to enlarge text or "Zoom out" to shrink it.

Safari 4

Go to the "View" menu. If "Zoom text only" is not ticked, select it. Then choose "Zoom in" to enlarge text or "Zoom out" to shrink it.

Safari 3

Go to the "View" menu and choose "Make text bigger" or "Make text smaller".

Plain text view

Most modern websites, including this one, can be viewed as a single column of content with minimum graphics. This is done by setting your web browser to use a basic stylesheet rather than the website’s graphic stylesheet. Here are instructions for the most popular web browsers:

Internet Explorer

If you don’t already have your own basic stylesheet you can download one from this site. Right-click on the following link and choose “Save target as”.

basic-stylesheet.css

Next, select “internet options” from the "Tools" menu and click the “Accessibility” button. Check the box “Format documents using my stylesheet” and click the browse button. Find the downloaded stylesheet and click the OK buttons.

To undo this, just go back and uncheck the box “Format documents using my stylesheet”.

Firefox

From the “View” menu, go to “Page style” and choose “No style”.

To undo this choose “Basic page style”.

Safari

If you don’t already have your own basic stylesheet you can download one from this site. Right-click on the following link and choose “Download linked file”. If your mouse doesn’t do right-click, just hold down the “control” key and click.

basic-stylesheet.css

Next, go to “Preferences on the “Safari” menu, click on the “Advanced” button then choose “other” from the “Style sheet” menu. Find the downloaded stylesheet and click “choose”, then close the box.

To undo this, go back and choose “None selected” from the “Style sheet” menu.

Alternative text for images

Images on our website have alternative text attributes, or alt text. This is a description of the image that is used by text browsers and assistive technologies such as screen readers. Descriptions are not included for decorative images.

Printer-friendly pages

You can print out every page of this website to fit standard A4 page size - no more wasted paper because sentences are cut in half.

Fast page download

We use style sheets instead of tables, and text instead of graphic-text where possible so that the page displays faster.

Easy to read content

We try to keep things short and easy to understand. This includes using bullet-points, chunking things together, using numbered lists where possible, making links easy to follow.

User testing

To get it right for all our users, we are spending time on user testing and site development. We will be involving disabled people with a range of impairments in testing the site to improve accessibility.

Tell us what you think

We want to hear from you about your experience of using our website as we add more features over time. Please let us know what you think.