Accessibility

This section of the website contains information on the accessibility of our web and print. Wherever possible we are committed to making all our methods of communication as accessible to as many people as possible.

Accessibility standards on the IDPONLINE website

The site has been designed to comply wherever possible with Level AA conformance of the W3C's WAI accessibility guidelines and in accordance with RNIB recommendations. W3C's WAI accessibility guidelines

Get our website read aloud
Our website is speech-enabled, meaning it can be read aloud to you.

We are committed to making our website accessible to as many people as possible, so we use Browsealoud, a computer program that reads out all website content, including attachments like PDFs and Word documents.

Browsealoud is especially helpful if you find reading large amounts of text on screen difficult, for example it can benefit people with literacy and visual impairments, or people whose first language isn't English. As you move your cursor over words, they are spoken aloud. Browsealoud is free for you to use; you just need to download the program onto your own computer. You can use Browsealoud on PCs and Macs.

Lots of other websites, such as Google and the BBC, also use Browsealoud so once you've installed it, you'll be able to listen to these websites too.

You can download Browsealoud to your own computer by visiting:
www.browsealoud.com/page.asp?pg_id=80004

If you are using a computer in a public space, such as a library, you can ask a member of staff if their computers are speech-enabled.

Support with using Browsealoud
Visit the Browsealoud website for support with using the software. You can read a user guide, get answers to commonly asked questions, or find out how to contact Browsealoud direct.

Please note that we do not offer support with using Browsealoud ourselves.

Using a public or locked-down computer?
Try Webanywhere
WebAnywhere is a free web-based screen reader for the web. No special software required to be installed on the client machine thus enabling the visually impaired to access the web from any computer with a sound card. WebAnywhere will run on any machine, even heavily locked-down public terminals, regardless of what operating system or browser.

The system works best with a recent version of Adobe Flash but also with Windows Media Player and Quicktime. This is an Alpha release, so it's still in development. The software will read all the navigation out to you, so use these keyboard shortcuts to help you navigate to the main text of a page:

• CTRL-L - move the cursor to the location box where you can type a URL to visit
• Arrow down - read the next element on the page
• Arrow up - read the previous element on the page
• CTRL-H - skip to the next heading
• CTRL-I - skip to the next input element
• CTRL-R - skip to the next row by cell when in a table
• CTRL-D - skip to the next column by cell when in a table
• Page down - read continuously from the current position
• Home - read continuously, starting over from the beginning of the page
• CTRL - silence WebAnywhere and pause the system