Accessibility
Accessibility Statement
This is the official accessibility statement for Emergency Response Ltd. If you have any questions or comments, please contact us.
Browser Compatibility
The best way to make a website accessible is to follow the latest HTML and CSS standards. This makes pages instantly accessible to assistive technologies such as voice-synthesising browsers and text-only browsers, because they are designed to work with these standards.
We recommend you keep your browser up-to-date to show your support for website standards and their accessibility benefits. The latest versions of all major browsers are standards-compliant, and they are getting even better.
Most browser manufacturers provide free upgrades on their websites. If you are not sure which version you have, go to your browser's "Help" menu, and choose "About..." (eg "About Internet Explorer" or "About Mozilla Firefox"). This will tell you which version you are running.
Links
- Links are written to make sense out of context. Most text-only and speech synthesising browsers have the option of listing all links in a page. This helps blind users to scan the site and reach the information they are looking for as quickly as a sighted user. Giving links informative text, instead of just "Click here" or "More information", allows users to make the most of this scanning feature.
- Many links have title attributes that describe the link in greater detail, unless the link text already fully describes the target (such as the headline of an article).
Images
- Images used in this site include descriptive ALT attributes. These are read out by speech browsers, and displayed by text-only browsers instead of the image itself. This helps blind or partially sighted visitors to understand the significance of each image.
- Purely decorative graphics include null ALT attributes, so that they are ignored by speech and text-only browsers.
Accessibility Tips
Re-sizing text
To make website text bigger:
- In Internet Explorer, go to "View" in the menu bar, then choose "Text Size" from the menu, and select the option you want (e.g. "Larger" or "Largest").
- In Mozilla Firefox browsers, go to "View" in the menu bar, then choose "Text Size" from the menu, where you can choose to increase or decrease the size as you wish.
Many sites also use images for their menu items, which are fixed in size. Our new site uses text links, made to look like buttons using stylesheets, so when you re-size your text, the menu re-sizes as well. Using text instead of images for the navigation also makes the site quicker to download.
Over-riding colours
If you have difficulty reading our colour scheme, or any other website, you can over-ride the colours, choosing a more comfortable combination:
- In Internet Explorer, go to the "Tools" menu and choose "Internet Options". Select the "Colors" button to choose your colours. Or select the "Accessibility" button to tell the browser to ignore colours, font styles and font sizes.
- In Mozilla Firefox, go to Tools > OptionsEdit > PreferencesFirefox > Preferences, select the Content panel, and click the Colours
button in the Fonts & Colours section. You can set default text and background colours, as well as default colours for visited and unvisited hyperlinks. You can also specify whether hyperlinks should be underlined. However, many web pages set their own colours, so your choices will have no effect. To override the colours defined by web pages, untick the Allow pages to choose their own colours, instead of my selections above option.
Some Accessibility Software
- JAWS, a screen reader for Windows. A time-limited, downloadable demo is available.
- Home Page Reader, a screen reader for Windows. A downloadable demo is available.
- Lynx, a free text-only web browser for blind users, with refreshable Braille displays.
- Links, a free text-only web browser for visual users with low bandwidth.
- Opera, a visual browser with many accessibility-related features, including user stylesheets. A free downloadable version is available.