We have worked to make the Realising potential web site as accessible as possible for all audiences, including disabled people. If you have any questions or suggestions regarding the accessibility of this site, please contact us as we are always looking for ways to improve the experience for all our visitors.

Our design standard

We designed this web site to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0, which is a World Wide Web Consortium recommendation dated May 5 1999. Version 2.0 is currently at the review stage.

In practice, this means that we followed various guidelines from the WCAG, as well as other useful guidelines from around the Web

Structure

• Rather than creating multiple versions of this site, make one accessible version of the site.
• Make the site structure as clear as possible.
• Provide a site map to show how the site is organised.
• Keep everything as simple as possible

Content

• Clearly label each section, and always lead with the most specific information.
• Structure pages of text well, with clear and meaningful headings.
• Provide text alternatives for all images.

Visual and other multimedia elements

• Use only relevant images.
• 'Clickable' elements in the interface, such as buttons and tabs will be large enough (or will have enough space around them) for visitors to reach.
• Provide support for increasing text size, and large fonts in general.

Browser support

As well as supporting all standards-compliant browsers, we designed this site to support the following specific browsers.

• Internet Explorer 5 for Windows
• Internet Explorer 5 for Macintosh
• Internet Explorer 5.5 for Windows
• Internet Explorer 6 for Windows
• Mozilla Firefox for Windows
• Mozilla Firefox for Macintosh
• Opera 8 for Windows
• Safari for Macintosh

A final note

We do not display accessibilty-standards approved badges in this site. Tools such as WebXACT (formerly known as Bobby) can help us to make the site accessible, but cannot help us make the site usable. So in addition to using these accessibility tools we also had the site tested by a diverse range of users. We then used the feedback from from these tests to improve the user experience on this site.

Having said that, it is our target to achieve a AA standard as measured against version 1.0 of the WCAG for this site. We are aware however, that a number of these checkpoints are subjective, and there may be instances where interpretation may vary.