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Accessibility

The havens are committed to ensuring our services are accessible to the community that we serve. In particular, we recognise the need to take reasonable steps to enable access to our website for those with impaired sight or other disabilities.

Work on making this site more accessible has been influenced by the Guidelines for UK Government Websites, which incorporate support for the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are used to separate visual formatting from structural markup. All pages created to our more recent design standards should render in some usable form on a wide range of browsers and, if necessary, should be viewable in a very basic form on browsers which do not recognise CSS or where CSS has been switched off.

Standards compliance

All pages conform at a minimum to Level AA compliance as specified by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

We strive to obey the spirit of the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) of 1995 with respect to the provision of services online, as required by the Disability Rights Commission (DRC).

This site is valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional.
This site uses valid CSS 2.0.

Navigation Aids

All pages include a standard side bar for easy navigation.

Links

Many links have title attributes which describe the link in greater detail, unless the text of the link already fully describes the target.

Images

All content images used on the home page and all other pages include descriptive ALT attributes.

Accessible PDF

We recommend that users download the latest version of Adobe Acrobat to view Adobe PDF files.

Adobe Acrobat 6.0 software provides a number of capabilities that improve access for disabled users. Including the following:

Read Adobe PDF files aloud using standard operating system text-to-speech functionality
Give greater control when using screen readers
Evaluate the accessibility of an Adobe PDF file
Create accessible Adobe PDF documents and forms quickly
Reduce the size of tagged Adobe PDF files for faster download times
Further information about Adobe's PDF accessibility please visit: http://access.adobe.com.

Please note some of our older archived Adobe PDF files may not be completely accessible when using screen readers.

Accessibility software

  • Jaws, a screen reader for Windows. A trial period demo is available.
  • Home page Reader, a screen reader for Windows. A trial period downloadable version is available.
  • Lynx, a free text only web browser for blind users with refreshable Braille displays.
  • Links, a free text only web browser for visual users with low bandwidth.
  • Opera, a visual browser with many accessibility-related features, including text zooming. A free downloadable version is available.

Accessibility services:

  • Bobby, a free service to analyse web pages for compliance to accessibility guidelines.
  • HTML Validator, a free service for checking that web pages conform to published HTML Standards.
  • Web page Backward Compatibility Viewer, a tool for viewing your web pages without a variety of modern browser features.