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Site help and accessibility

Features that help you to use this web site

We intend that you should find this site accessible and easy to use, whatever your chosen web browser, computer or other web-enabled device. This page sets out some information that you might find helpful when using this web site, covering

Also, for an explanation of the many ways you can change your browser, computer, keyboard and mouse settings to make the web more accessible for you, we highly recommend the BBC My Web My Way site.

If you have difficulty reading any part of this site, please let us know by sending an email to ombudsman[at]slso[dot]org[dot]uk (replace [at] with @ and [dot] with .).

Text size

If you are using a visual browser, you can change the size of the text for more comfortable viewing.

In Internet Explorer, you can make your default text size larger under the View menu (located on the toolbar) by selecting Text Size, Larger (or Largest). Other browsers have similar text size options under their View menus.

If you have a wheel mouse, some browsers (including Internet Explorer) allow you to increase or decrease the text size by holding down the Ctrl key while you move the scroll wheel up or down.

Internet Explorer version 7 and Opera both have a “zoom” feature, allowing you to change the magnification of the page view:

Some links have title attributes that describe the link destination in greater detail. If you use a screen reader, you may wish to adjust its verbosity settings to take advantage of this feature.

Navigation with the tab key

If you navigate using the keyboard rather than a mouse, you will find additional links at the top of the page that let you skip past the main content to the navigation menus. These links will not normally appear in the visual design until you navigate to them with the tab key.

Tabbing thereafter follows a logical order through any links and form fields in the page content, then the links in the navigation menu. In modern graphical browsers, when you tab to a link or form field, its appearance changes to indicate that you are “focused” on it.

Additional navigation aids

As appropriate, each page has “relational” home, next, previous or other links to aid navigation in text-only browsers. If you use a recent version of the Opera or SeaMonkey (formerly Mozilla) browsers, you can take advantage of this feature too:

Accesskeys (“shortcut” keys)

We have not defined accesskeys on this site, because it is almost impossible to assign key combinations that will not conflict with combinations already defined by browsers or assistive technology software that you might be using. If you think that the lack of accesskeys truly impairs your ability to use this site, please tell us by sending an email to ombudsman[at]slso[dot]org[dot]uk (replace [at] with @ and [dot] with .).

Printing pages from this web site

If you have a modern browser that supports Cascading Style Sheets for print media, when you print a page only the text and any pertinent images will be printed: superfluous matter such as navigation menus will disappear. (Please see our copyright notice concerning printing.)

Downloadable documents

Although not part of the primary content of this web site, we offer some documents published by the Ombudsman for download — notably the Annual Reports to Scottish Ministers, saving interested parties the purchase price of the publication. These are historical documents under copyright and other legal restrictions, and were designed for print. For these reasons we provide the downloadable versions in Portable Document Format (PDF). To read or print these documents, you will need a PDF viewer such as Adobe Reader, which is available free of charge for a range of operating systems from the Adobe web site.

Design standards and compliance

In acknowledgement of the UK Disability Discrimination Act requirements in so far as they apply to web sites, this site was designed to meet the standards and benchmarks set out below.

  1. In building the site, the developers followed the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0, and all pages meet or exceed Conformance Level Double-A. (See the note about compliance testing below.)
  2. All pages are built with valid HTML 4.01 Strict. You may check the HTML validation status of this page, for example.
  3. The presentation of pages — that is, their layout and visual style — is separate from their structure and is determined using valid CSS 2.1. You may check the CSS validation status of this page, for example. The presentation of pages may differ depending on the equipment or software you use to access the web, but the content of the site is available to all.
  4. All pages use structured, semantic markup. Headings and subheadings are marked up with h1, h2, h3 etc. tags. Paragraphs, lists, quotations etc. are also marked up appropriately. This makes the structure of pages clearer and easier to navigate for non-disabled people as well as those with a range of disabilities.
  5. Some minor enhancements are provided by JavaScript using standard Document Object Model methods, for those browsers that support it. However, the site does not depend on JavaScript for any of its essential functionality or content, so it is fully accessible if scripting is disabled or not supported by your browser.
  6. No “plugins” or other programs need be downloaded or installed in order use this web site.

Note

Level Double-A conformance, W3C-WAI Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0The site developers have assessed compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines by a combination of automated testing using the TAW3 validator, and by human verification against the published checkpoints for the stated Conformance Level.

Source: http://www.slso.org.uk/accessibility.shtml