Policies
Website Accessibility

It is our intention that the Friends of Ram Hill Colliery website should be as simple to use as possible, by as many people as possible, irrespective of what kind of hardware or software they are using or how they navigate around and use the site. To this end we have followed the Web Content Accessiblity Guidelines (WCAG), an international standard developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), and we are proud to be able to make the following conformance claim:

Some of the accessibility features that we have incorporated into the Friends of Ram Hill Colliery website are described in the following paragraphs.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

Through the extensive use of the W3C's Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) technology, we have been able to separate the formatting information for each page (such as colours, layout, and the appearance of text) from the content. Apart from reducing the download time for each page – as the CSS data need only be downloaded once for the whole site – this has also allowed us to specify different formatting information depending on the hardware and software you're using to view the website. Consequently, small-screen and low-resolution devices can make the best use of their display capabilities, screen readers can save time when reading a page to a user, and printers can be more economical on ink and paper by omitting certain parts of the page that are either unnecessary or take up too much valuable space.

One major feature of the Friends of Ram Hill Colliery website that makes full use of CSS is the colour scheme, and we've worked hard to ensure that there is always a 7:1 contrast ratio between the text and background colours. This ratio – regardless of the actual colours used – is necessary for the majority of people with visual impairments to be able to read documents easily, and is also a Level AAA conformance requirement of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

Navigation

The navigational structure of this website is designed to be a simple three-tier heirarchy. This structure is reflected in the breadcrumb trail ("You are here") at the top-left of each page which follows you as you browse the website. Each item in the breadcrumb trail is a link to that particular level in the heirarchy, allowing you to find related pages and information with ease. We have also taken care to include links to nearby pages throughout the site; and links to the most important pages can always be found in the footer, immediately following the main content.

One of these important pages is the Site Map which provides quick and easy access to every page of the Friends of Ram Hill Colliery website to save you having to navigate down through the heirarchy.

"Skip to" links

At the very top of each page is a set of links that allow you to jump directly to either the beginning or the end of the main content of the page. Note that in some browsers only the visual focus will be moved, but not the input focus. This is due to limitations in the software, and is beyond our control.

Links to other websites

To make it more obvious which links point to other websites not owned or controlled by us (i.e. "external links"), each such link uses italic text and – where the browser supports the necessary CSS rule – has an icon () appended to it. You can see this in action with the external links at the beginning of this page.

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