Accessibility Statement

Hine Downing is committed to providing a website that is accessible to the widest possible audience – regardless of ability or browsing technology and including those who have visual, hearing, motor and cognitive impairments.

The site aims to achieve overall compliance with the Web Accessibility Initiative’s (WAI) guidelines.

Our aim has been to design a simply and clearly laid out site which is easy to use for all visitors to the site. However if you are having problems using or finding your way around the site, the following areas may help.

Navigation

The navigation bar at the top of the page contains the main site links. There are also useful options at the top and bottom navigation bar contained on each page.

Scrolling content

Depending on your machine and setting some pages will contain scrolling content. This unfortunately poses problems for some users. The arrow keys on your keyboard as well as the ‘up’ and ‘down’ arrow keys should help with scrolling. On these pages you should also find links taking you back to the top of the page.

Browser Accessibility Options

You can specify the font sizes, styles and colours, and foreground and background colours of web pages displayed on your computer, even if the person creating the web page has already specified these. You can also set the colour you would like to indicate links in web pages.

This could be useful if you have impaired vision or find certain colours or contrasts easier to read.

You can set Internet Explorer to use the fonts and colours of your choice, or to use the Windows ‘default’ colours and fonts.

Microsoft Internet Explorer for PC

  • Open Internet Explorer Web Browser.
  • Select ‘Tools’ from the menu at the top of your window.
  • From the options which appear, select ‘Internet options…’.
  • Click the ‘General’ tab.
  • Click the button marked ‘Accessibility’.
  • To change the font size, tick the checkbox labelled ‘Ignore font sizes specified on Web pages’.
  • To remove background and font colours, tick the checkbox labelled ‘Ignore colours specified on web pages’.
  • Click OK (and again if necessary).
  • Select ‘View’ from the menu at the top of the window.
  • Select ‘Text Size’.
  • Select desired text size.

Microsoft Internet Explorer for Apple Mac

  • Open Internet Explorer Web Browser.
  • Select the “edit” menu at the top of the window.
  • From the options menu which appears, select “preferences”.
  • Click “web content”.
  • Deselect the button labelled “show style sheets”.
  • Return to the list of preferences.
  • Click on “web browser”.
  • Select “language/fonts”.
  • Select the font size you require.

Instructions for users of Netscape Navigator Text:

  • Select ‘Edit’ from the menu at the top of the window and choose ‘Preferences’.
  • Open the Appearance group and click on ‘Fonts’ category.
  • Next to ‘For the encoding’ should read Western to tell the computer which types of letters and symbols to use. Select 18 from ‘size’.
  • Next to the Variable Width Font field there is a drop down box – select ‘Arial’. The Fixed Width Font box should read ‘Courier New’ – select 18 from ‘size’.
  • To override the fonts used by the web page author, select ‘use my default fonts overriding document specified fonts’.
  • Click on ‘OK’

Colours:

  • Select ‘Edit’ from the menu at the top of the window and choose ‘Preferences’.
  • Open the Appearance group and click on the ‘Colours’ category.
  • Select a colour button to change the colours of text, background, unvisited links, or visited links.
  • To override the colours used by the web page author, select ‘Always use my colours, overriding document’.
  • Click on ‘OK’.

Downloadable Documents

A number of downloadable documents available within this site are in Portable Document Format (often referred to as PDF). In order to view a PDF document, you need free software called Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Adobe Acrobat Reader can be downloaded from the Adobe web site by following the link below:

If you use a screen reading program which synthesizes text as audible speech you may experience difficulty reading PDF files. The Access Adobe web site provides online tools to convert PDF documents into standard HTML or ASCII text. The site can be visited via the link below:

W3C Validation

This website is built using code compliant with World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards for XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets.

W3C is the governing authority on web development standards and practices.

Useful links

The site displays correctly with current browsers, and using standard XHTML code means that any future browsers will also display this website correctly. If you have a problem viewing any part of this website in your browser, email the web team at general@hinedowning.com

The following websites will have useful advice and information about web accessibility.