The Isle of Wight College

Web Accessibility

Website Design

The College website has been designed to provide a fast, media-rich browsing experience, with text equivalents on all non-text elements and high contrast between text and background colours.

Progressive Enhancement

The Isle of Wight College website has been built using the latest web technologies to give you a fast and modern web experience regardless of your browser, platform or device.

The College website uses Javascript to provide responsive functionality and user interface enhancements that will degrade gracefully and still function if Javascript is not enabled/available.

Switchable Themes

The College site features a built-in style switcher to allow our users to switch between the default theme (with all images and styles applied) and an easy-to-see high contrast, minimal theme for maximum accessibility.

This can be accessed from the ‘Accessibility and Language Tools’ toolbar at the top of every page across the site.

Content Translation

The College website connects to Google Translate, allowing on-the-fly translation to over 40 different languages.

Printable Pages

All pages within The College website have been designed to print without elements that are redundant for print media (such as video, sound and in some cases links) to provide clean, easy to read printed pages.

Headings and Content

All web content has been arranged to convey structure with appropriate use of headings and mark up to allow our content to be viewed easily through assistive browsing software and/or hardware.

Content Text

All text on our website is fully resizable using built-in browser controls, simply follow the instructions below for your desktop browser:

Internet Explorer

• Select ‘View’ from the browser toolbar
• Select ‘Text size’ from the drop-down menu
• Select your preferred text size

Google Chrome

• Click the ‘wrench’ icon from the browser toolbar
• Find the ‘Zoom’ section in the menu and choose one of the following options:
• Click ‘  + ‘ to make everything on the page larger
• Click ‘ – ‘  to make everything smaller.

Firefox

• Select ‘View’ from the browser toolbar
• Select ‘Text size’ from the drop-down menu
• Select your preferred text size

Safari

• Select ‘View’ from the browser toolbar
• Select ‘Make text bigger’ or ‘Make text smaller’ from the drop-down menu

Opera

• Select ‘View’ from the browser toolbar
• Select ‘Zoom’ from the drop-down menu

Multimedia

All video content within our website is embedded from our YouTube channel, this allow us to use its  built-in accessibility features (such as descriptions and captions) which allow our video content to be heard but also seen by those with hearing disabilities or lack of audio hardware, the captions within our video content can also be translated on-the-fly into over 40 different languages by connecting to Google Translate.

All images use alt tags to provide descriptive text alternatives of images on the website.

Links

The College website uses a consistant visual style for links and appropriate use of link titles and tooltips.

Forms

All forms within The College website use appropriate labels, controls and access keys to make our forms as easy to use and accessibile as possible.

The College website uses Recaptcha to validate user form submissions, this system also provides audio alternatives for visually impaired users.

PDF Files

Certain information on The College website is in Portable Document Format (PDF). You will need to download Adobe Acrobat Reader to read PDF files.
Adobe Acrobat Reader can be downloaded for free from the Adobe website.

Accessibility : Further Information

For tips on customizing your web browser to suit your needs, have a look at the BBC’s – my web, my way initiative. It contains helpful tips for optimizing your browsing experience.

Website Feedback

We’ve worked hard to make our website accessible and easy to use but we know that it’s an ongoing job and we welcome comments or suggestions on how we can improve our website.

Tags : accessibility · college · information · website

Posted in : Information