Accessibility

Catalyst Housing Group aims to ensure that the content of our web site is accessible to the greatest possible audience, and the widest range of software and hardware.

Font sizes

You may change the font size of this document using the preference-settings of your browser. Follow the steps below to change the size of the text for the web page you are viewing:

Internet Explorer
  1. Open the ' View ' menu with the mouse or by pressing ' Alt ' and ' V '.
  2. Select the ' Text Size ' option with the mouse or by pressing ' X '.
  3. Choose your preferred text size with the mouse or by using the up and down arrow keys and pressing ' Enter ' or by clicking on it.
Firefox

Press ' Ctrl ' and ' + ' to increase the text size.

Press 'Ctrl ' and ' - ' to decrease the text size.

Press ' Ctrl ' and ' 0 ' to return to the default size.

Useful links

The BBC web site provides useful information on adjusting text size in a number of browsers and a range of other software.

The Directgov web site provides useful information on adjusting accessibility features for the two most popular browsers:

Standards compliance

  • All pages on our site validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional. This helps to ensure that content can be accessed on the widest possible range of browsers and devices.
  • As a minimum all pages on our web site are WCAG A approved, complying with all the W3C Priority 1 Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
  • Our aim is for all pages on this site to be WCAG AAA approved, complying with all the W3C Priority 1, 2 and 3 Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. We plan to implementing WCAG AAA compliance on a phased basis.

Speech enabled

Catalyst Housing Group subscribes to the Browsealoud service. Browsealoud is software which allows you the option of having our website content read to you. As you move the cursor over text Browsealoud begins speaking. Browsealoud is free to download and you have control over the voice, word pronunciations and speech highlighting.

Browsealoud

Users who prefer to use open source software (rather than commercial software) may like to try Fire Vox, which is a screen reader that is designed especially for the Firefox web browser. This open source, freely available talking browser extension for Firefox can be downloaded from the Fire Vox website.

Links

Hyperlink text has been written to make sense out of context, and, where necessary, title attributes which describe the link in greater detail have been added.

Images

All content images used in our site include descriptive ALT attributes. Purely decorative graphics are either applied using CSS, or include null ALT attributes.

PDF files

We publish HTML versions of many of our publications, including information leaflets. PDF files are used to publish documents where it is more appropriate. Recent PDF file standards provide improved levels of accessibility, through technologies like screen readers, navigation through the keyboard and enhanced screen viewing. The Adobe site provides information on how best to use these features. Adobe also provides an online PDF conversion tool that converts PDF files to text and to HTML.

Translation

Catalyst Housing Group provides key contact information in nine community languages. We publish all current translated documents online.

Languages available for translationtranslation index

We do not offer a translated version of our entire web site. The site contains a significant amount of content, much of which is updated regularly, and a great deal of which is interactive. The resources required to translate this content and keep multiple versions of the site up to date would have a detrimental impact on other services that we provide.

Online translation services are able to translate pages of our site into a number of common languages.

  

Useful information

World Wide Web Consortium

W3C Web Accessibility Initiative

Guidelines for UK Government web sites

Accessible Technology (Directgov)

Disability Rights Commission

Testing and validation

W3C HTML Validator

WebXACT (Accessibility testing tool)

Commercial sites

Bobby

IBM Home Page Reader

Adobe PDF accessibility

Adobe online PDF conversion tool