In keeping with our policy of customers first, and our obligations under the DDA (Disability Discrimination Act), we will ensure that our website is accessible to people who have visual, hearing, motor or cognitive impairments. Making our website accessible is a core aim of the Benefit Options Development Team and we will try and ensure that it is usable with a broad range of operating systems, browsers, and specialist assistive technologies. As a standard, we employ all the following methods to ensure our site is accessible to as many people as possible:

Text

We are committed to Plain English in all our written content.

All text is written in a non-serif font for easier readability.

We use a hierarchy of heading markups to enable for screen readers to understand the structure of a page (i.e. for main headings, for secondary headings).

This site uses only relative font sizes, compatible with the user-specified "text size" option in visual browsers. For those using Internet Explorer, go to View > Text Size > and select your desired size. For Firefox users, simply hold the CTRL button and press + or - to increase or decrease the size.

Our site can be viewed in a logical order when all styling is turned off.

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.

Visual Design

This site uses cascading style sheets for visual layout, and semantic XHTML for structure.

If your browser or browsing device does not support style sheets at all, the content of each page is still readable.

All images used in this site include descriptive ALT attributes. Purely decorative graphics include null ALT attributes.

Complex images include LONGDESC attributes or inline descriptions to explain the significance of each image to non-visual readers.

Our site has been designed without the use of tables except where we need to represent normally tabulated content.

 

If there is an instance when our site does not meet the need of a specific disabled user group we will make changes to our current content, wherever appropriate, so that we can become more inclusive to a wider audience. Please contact us if this is the case.