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Accessibility statement

Smiths Gore recognises the importance of providing a website that is accessible to all user groups, including the disabled. We have implemented the following accessibility features on this website to make it easier to use for people with disabilities.


Access keys

We have provided a series of keyboard shortcuts intended to help users who have difficulty in using pointing devices such as a mouse.

Most browsers support jumping to specific links by typing keys defined on the web site. Access keys are selected in different ways in different browsers:

  • Internet Explorer 7 on Windows:
    hold down the Alt key and the access key, then release them and hit Enter to activate the link.
  • Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 5 on Windows:
    hold down the Alt key and the access key, then press enter
  • Internet Explorer 4 on Windows
    hold Alt and the access key.
  • Internet Explorer 5 and upwards for Mac
    Ctrl and the access key (unfortunately, access keys are not supported in earlier versions).
  • Firefox 2, Firefox 3 Windows
    Shift + Alt and the access key.
  • Firefox - older versions
    Alt and access key.
  • Firefox Mac
    Ctrl and access key.
  • Netscape 6 and upwards for Windows
    Alt and access key (unfortunately, access keys aren't supported in earlier versions of netscape)
  • Mozilla on Windows
    Alt and access key.
  • Opera
    hold the shift key and press escape then realease them. This will bring up a menu of the access keys on the page. Press the desired access key.

All pages on this site define the following access keys:

  • Access key 1 - Home
  • Access key 3 - Site Map
  • Access key 9 - Contact us
  • Access key 0 - Accessibility Statement (this page)
  • Access key T - Top of Page

Standards compliance

  • Each page on this site complies with all Priority 1 checkpoints from the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. This is a judgement call; many guidelines are intentionally vague and can not be tested automatically.
  • All pages on this site use structured semantic markup. H1 tags are used for main titles, H2 tags for subtitles. For example, on this page, JAWS users can skip to the next section within the accessibility statement by pressing ALT+INSERT+3.
  • Navigation menus are marked up as HTML lists. This ensures that the number of links in the list is read out at the start and it can be skipped easily.

Links

  • Many links have title attributes which 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 out of context.

Images

  • All content images used in this site include descriptive ALT attributes. Purely decorative graphics include empty ALT attributes.
  • Complex images include LONGDESC attributes or inline descriptions to explain the significance of each image to non-visual readers.

Visual design

  • This site uses cascading style sheets for visual layout.
  • This site uses only relative font sizes, compatible with the user-specified "text size" option in visual browsers.
  • If your browser or browsing device does not support stylesheets at all, the content of each page is still readable.

© Smiths Gore 2010