Accessibility

This page describes the steps we have taken to make this website accessible to all users.

sportscotland is committed to producing websites and web resources that can be accessed by all users. All pages produced on the sportscotland website conform to the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C), Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Level-A standard as a minimum.

If you have any difficulties using this website, please contact the sportscotland Web Manager via the comments form below.

Standards compliance

1. All pages on this site have passed the WCAG Priority 1,2 & 3 Guidelines using the Cynthia Says automated test .
2. Most pages on this site validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional.
3. Most stylesheets on this site validate as CSS.

Navigation aids

1. All pages have rel=previous, next, up, and home links to aid navigation in text-only browsers. Netscape 6 and Mozilla users can also take advantage of this feature by selecting the View menu, Show/Hide, Site Navigation Bar, Show Only As Needed (or Show Always).
2. The tips are cross-referenced in several ways. You can browse the tips by person, by disability, by design principle, by assistive technology, and by publishing tool.
3. The home page and all archive pages include a search box (access key 4). Advanced search options are available at the advanced search page.

Links

1. 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).
2. Links are written to make sense out of context.

Images

1. All content images used in this site include descriptive ALT attributes. Purely decorative graphics include null ALT attributes.
2. Complex images include LONGDESC attributes or inline descriptions to explain the significance of each image to non-visual readers.

Visual design

1. This site uses cascading style sheets for visual layout.
2. This site uses only relative font sizes, compatible with the user-specified "text size" option in visual browsers.
3. If your browser or browsing device does not support stylesheets at all, the content of each page is still readable.

Accessibility references

1. W3 accessibility guidelines, which explains the reasons behind each guideline.
2. W3 accessibility techniques, which explains how to implement each guideline.
3. W3 accessibility checklist, a busy developer's guide to accessibility.  

Accessibility software

1. JAWS, a screen reader for Windows. A time-limited, downloadable demo is available.
2. Home Page Reader, a screen reader for Windows. A downloadable demo is available.
3. Lynx, a free text-only web browser for blind users with refreshable Braille displays.
4. Links, a free text-only web browser for visual users with low bandwidth.
5. Opera, a visual browser with many accessibility-related features, including text zooming, user stylesheets, image toggle. A free downloadable version is available. Compatible with Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and several other operating systems.

Accessibility services

1. Bobby, a free service to analyze web pages for compliance to accessibility guidelines. A full-featured commercial version is also available.
2. HTML Validator, a free service for checking that web pages conform to published HTML standards.
3. Web Page Backward Compatibility Viewer, a tool for viewing your web pages without a variety of modern browser features.
4. Lynx Viewer, a free service for viewing what your web pages would look like in Lynx.

Related resources

1. WebAIM, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving accessibility to online learning materials.
2. Designing More Usable Web Sites, a large list of additional resources.