Accessibility

CIH take its responsibilities under the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) seriously and recognises that goods and services must be offered on equal terms to all people. CIH sees the use of the internet as being a key enabler for disabled users to obtain information.

CIH is committed to providing its online services to all sections of the community. Our website design is constantly being improved to follow the accessibility guidelines issued by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative and the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB).

CIH have worked in close connection with Internet Arrow website designers to assist in achieving the afforementioned guidelines.

CIH websites conform to the following criteria:

• W3C WAI WCAG 1.0 Level A
• CSS 1.0
• XHTML 1.0 *

Sites are checked on a continuous basis to make sure these levels are conformed too.

* Note: RSS feeds are used on the CIH site to provide regularly updated housing news from around the UK. These feeds are provided by third party websites which are not under CIH control. In cases where news feeds are not compliant with the XHTML 1.0 specification this is an issue with the external provider.

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 of the CIH website:

Use of 'alternative text' to describe images. This is useful for text-based browsers and/or for users with visual impairments.

Implementation of 'skip menu' feature to allow users of speech or text rendering software to bypass the menu structure of a page and go straight to the content.

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 webmaster@CIH.co.uk

No Access Keys?

Based upon advice from Nomensa, recognised Web Accessibility experts, we have decided not to provide Access keys on this website.

A quote from them:

"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." Nomensa statement

Downloads

We have used PDF (portable document format) to deliver some content on this website. This is a format which retains the document's original 'look and feel' which may be important for forms and legal documents, or for ensuring 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. We are also pleased to offer users a direct link to Adobe's on-line converter which saves having to download the Access Adobe program; this allows you to enter the URL of a PDF document into an on-line form and just that document will be converted for you.

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. For information about different browsers including those designed for use by disabled people, please follow this link to the Directgov website: Computers options and Directgov

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.