The University of Salford strives to ensure that this website is accessible to everyone. If you have any questions or suggestions regarding the accessibility of this site, or if you come across a page or resource that does not meet your access needs, please contact the webmaster@salford.ac.uk, as we are continually striving to improve the experience for all of our visitors.
The following section has been adapted with kind permission from RNIB.
Below is an outline of what you can expect to be able to do on sites maintained by the University of Salford, whatever your browser settings or reading needs might be.
You will be able to reach all parts of the website by following links that are keyboard navigable. This means that if you have impaired mobility or sight, you will be able to use your keyboard tab key or switch device to move from link to link, knowing that no parts of the site are "hidden" behind links that can only be displayed by mouse action.
All text is resizable, so if it is too small or large for easy reading, you can use your browser setting to display it at the size you prefer.
If you have already selected a non-standard text size in your browser settings, the size you prefer will be visible from the moment you enter the website, and you won't need to reset it for each page.
The wording for text links will be carefully chosen so that each link is:
Links that are constructed as described above, are useful for all visitors, especially those who have modern browsers or access technologies that enable them to extract a list of links from web pages, so that they are easier to sort and faster to select.
A text alternative will be provided for all images, relevant to the reason for the image being there, and will be as short and to the point as possible. The information you get from the alternative text will depend on the reason for the image:
By using these rules the website will be giving screen reader users a page reading experience that is as close as possible to that enjoyed by sighted visitors. It also makes sure that no information is lost if the image isn't large enough for you to read, or images have been turned off to speed up browsing on mobile connections.
Colours will be chosen to provide good contrast between text and its background, and avoid combinations that are known to cause difficulties for people with colour blindness.
In addition, colour styling will ensure that no parts of the page would be unreadable if you have chosen non-standard colours in your browser colour settings.
A change of colour won't be used as the only way to identify any information. So for instance you won't see phrases such as "streets liable to flooding are in red text". This is obviously because some people can't see the screen, but also because other people may be unable to tell the difference between colours, either because of colour blindness or because their screen doesn't process colours well enough.
Completing forms is made easy because the information you need to complete each input box will be clear and well positioned:
You won't find many uses of new windows in the site and where we do have, then you will find a warning either in the link text or the sentence the link is given in. Typically new windows are used for audio and video.
Any information that is presented in video, audio or multimedia will have alternatives that make the same information available to people who are unable to see or hear.
This means that captioning or transcript will be used to complement audible or visible information.
No part of the website will be impossible to either reach or use because of a total reliance on JavaScript.
Whenever JavaScript is used, it won't create moving text that cannot be stopped, nor use controls that can't be operated by either the mouse or the keyboard.
We don't encourage the use of text only pages, but if there is information in a format that simply can't be made accessible to all, then a text alternative is necessary. If a text alternative page is to be provided, then the less accessible page will provide a link to the text version, before you reach the inaccessible content.