Accessibility Statement
The University of Wales Lampeter is committed to providing an accessible web presence that gives visitors full access to University information, courses and activities.
Our website design is constantly being improved to follow the accessibility guidelines issued by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB).
The main central website conforms to the following criteria:
- W3C WAI WCAG 1.0 Level AA
- CSS 2.1
- XHTML 1.0
Pages are checked on a continuous basis to ensure we conform to these.
Unfortunately some parts of the site do not yet meet the above criteria but we are working to improve the accessibility of these pages.
There are many features built into modern web browsers which allow personal preferences to be set, for example the adjustment of colours and text size. These features can usually be found by asking for 'Help' in your browser program and entering the phrase 'accessibility'.
The following is a list of some of the actions we have already taken in order to improve accessibility:
- Use of 'alternative text' to describe images. This is useful for text-based browsers and/or for users with visual impairments.
- Links to the Adobe Acrobat Access reader for PDF Adobe Acrobat files.
- Use of 'cascading style sheets' (CSS) which means that it is easy for a user to over-ride page settings to make it easier for them to view the page. In this way you can:
- Increase contrast between background and text for readability purposes
- Change text colours
- Change background colours
- Ensuring that fields in online forms can be navigated in order by pressing 'Tab' in a keyboard.
Please let us know of any accessibility issues you encounter whilst using our web site by emailing our Web Development Officer - clive.jones@lamp.ac.uk
No Access Keys?
Based upon advice from Nomensa (recognised Web Accessibility experts) we have decided to no longer provide Access keys on this website.
To quote Nomensa:
"Access keys are not used by the people who are supposed to use them, and could even hinder people if poorly implemented. The time would be better spent on a technique that is known to work, such as skip links.
“Although access keys are intended to improve site navigation, it is shown they actually can interfere with web accessibility. In terms of implementing a common standard, it would require a universal understanding of access keys to be applied to every site."
Downloads
We have used PDF (portable document format) to deliver some content on this website. This is a format which retains the documents original 'look and feel' which may be important for forms and legal documents, or for ensuring that appearance on the website is comparable with the printed version. There is a link to the Access Adobe website where you can download a free program which will convert PDF documents to HTML or plain text.
Where Microsoft Office (Word, Excel) documents have been used, we would advise users who do not have Microsoft Office to download the appropriate Office Viewer from Microsoft's site.
Changing the settings on your browser
We provide here the instructions to change the 'view' settings on the three most common browsers: Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE), Mozilla Firefox and Netscape Navigator. Other graphical browsers work in similar ways.
Microsoft Internet Explorer version 4 and above:
- Select 'View' (version 4) or 'Tools' (version 5 and 6) from the top pull down menu options.
- Select 'Internet Options'.
- From this menu screen you may select the 'Colors' options by clicking on the buttons at the bottom of the screen.
- You can now change the default colour for the background and font.
- 'Use Windows colors' can be deselected by clicking on the box.
- Once this has been done, the text and background selections can be changed by clicking on the boxes themselves.
- Selecting the 'Fonts' button will give you the ability to change the style of font used by your browser.
- Once selected any international character set can be selected and any font resident on your computer can be used.
- The 'Accessibility' button allows you to accept or decline styling put in place by our cascading style sheet (CSS).
- The three options available are to ignore colour, font type and font size declarations.
Mozilla Firefox
- Select 'View' from the top pull down menu options.
- To alter text size, select 'Text size' then Increase (Ctrl&+) or decrease (Ctrl&-)
- To remove CSS stylings select 'Page style', then no style.
Netscape Navigator
- Select 'Edit' from the top pull down menu options.
- Select 'Preferences'.
- From this menu screen you may select the 'Colors' option by clicking on the word.
- You can now change the default colour for the background and font.
- 'Use Windows colors' can be deselected by clicking on the box.
- Once this has been done, the text and background selections can be changed by clicking on the boxes themselves.
- Selecting the Fonts option will give you the ability to change the style of font used by your browser.
- Once selected any international character set can be selected and any font resident on your computer can be used.
