Accessibility
The HFEA strives for inclusive and accessible information for all its clients.
Our accessibility strategy therefore has a very broad reach, and considers the needs of people:
- with visual, hearing or motor impairments;
- with cognitive impairments;
- with reading difficulties such as dyslexia;
- whose mother tongue is not English;
- from different cultural and socio-economic backgrounds; and
- of various ages.
Our aims
The HFEA are committed to the following accessibility principles:
- Designing for use with assistive technologies: ensuring that our media work well with technologies such as software that reads pages aloud.
- standards in commissioning, editorial, design and coding. These standards include the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative and the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA, part three).
- The HFEA works closely with specialist accessibility consultancies and with real users on an ongoing basis to ensure that any problems are identified and solutions developed as a matter of priority;
- looking for new ways of offering rich media in an accessible way and helping the development of technologies and standards for accessibility.
Guidelines we follow
The accessibility guidelines we follow include:
- Allowing users to control text sizes.
- Using an easy to read font type.
- Ensuring suitable foreground and background colour contrast.
- Using clear and simple grammar.
- Providing meaningful text equivalents for pictures.
- Providing simple, consistent site navigation.
- Ensuring the target of each link is clearly defined.
- Providing a sitemap.
- Providing navigational shortcuts for users of text only browsers and page readers.
- Using appropriate structural mark-up to maximise browser support.
- Ensuring all content and functionality is available to users without content style sheet (CSS), image and script support.
Content availability
We recognise that a great deal of content on the HFEA website is provided in PDF format. To download a PDF reader (free of charge) please visit http://www.adobe.com/reader
If you require any of our PDF documents in an alternate format such as Microsoft Word or Rich Text Format (RTF) please contact us (below) and we will endeavor to meet your request.
Contact us
We test, improve and maintain the HFEA site on an ongoing basis and we will try hard to solve any problems with the site as we become aware of them.
If you have any problems with the site, or suggestions, email us at enquiries@hfea.gov.uk
Page last updated: 17 March 2009