Accessibility

Oakmere
Belmont Business Park
Durham
DH1 1TW
T: 0191 370 8520
F: 0191 384 8228

•

Richmond Station
Station Yard
Richmond
North Yorkshire
DL10 4LD

T: 01748 829 210
F: 01748 829 468

•

Swallow Cottage
Hamsterley
Bishop Auckland
DL13 3QF

T: 01388 487 000
F: 01388 488 836

•

The Estate Office
Lambton Park
Chester le Street
County Durham
DH3 4PQ

T: 0191 385 2435
F: 0191 385 6838

Whilst creating this web site we have made every effort to ensure that all the pages are accessible to everyone according to the W3C WAI guidelines. Whilst many W3C standards remain intentionally vague and therefore subject to individual judgement, some can be automatically tested. We have run a variety of recognised automated tests and reviewed all pages created. We have made every effort to comply with the accessibility standards and guidelines from the W3C WAI to at least priority 2, though we recognise that owing to the many different interpretations of the guidelines, there may be instances where this may be seen not to be the case.

If you have any difficulty accessing any part of the site, please let us know and we will do our best to rectify the problem immediately.

W3C Standards:

We have made every effort to ensure the following:

All pages on this site are W3C Web Accessibility Initiative AA approved, complying with priority 1 and 2 guidelines of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. (Most pages on the website are AAA approved with priority 3 of the W3C WCAG)
All pages on this site are Section 508 Guidelines approved (U.S. Federal Government)
All HTML pages on this site validate as W3C XHTML 1.0 Transitional
All Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) used on this site validate as W3C Cascading Style Sheets, level 2 CSS2 Specification

Accessibility in Design:

We have made every effort to ensure the following:

All pages on this site use structured semantic markup.
Content has been separated from visual design and cascading style sheets (CSS) are used for visual layout.
Only relative font sizes, compatible with the user-specified "text size" option in visual browsers are used.
If your browser or browsing device does not support style sheets, the page content is still readable.
Navigation items have background changes to highlight links.
Many links have title attributes which describe the link in greater detail, unless the text of the link already fully describes the target.
Links are written to make sense out of context.
Links to external web sites open up a new browser window where this is supported by the browser.
All content images used in this site include descriptive ALT attributes. Decorative graphics include null ALT attributes.
No images are used to convey information.
No information is exclusively conveyed using colour.
Tables are only used for layout purposes if there is no other feasable way of representing the information to the required effect.

Access keys & Tab indexes:

Most browsers support jumping to specific links by typing keys defined on the web site. On Windows, you can press ALT + access key; on Apple Macintosh, you can press Control + access key.

This web site can be navigated without the use of a mouse from the site map page (access key M)

Access keys used on this site

• Home = h
• Site Map = m
• Skip to Content = s
• Contact Us = c
• Terms and Privacy Statement = t
• Accessibility Statement = 0 (zero)

Tab indexes are set such that the content links are presented first in the sequence they appear on the page.

Testing

The web site has passed tests using the following automated tests:

Watchfire tested for WCAG Priority 1,2,3
Cynthia tested for WCAG Priority 1,2,3 and Section 208
Tested by the W3C Markup Validation Service
Tested by the W3C CSS Validator