Accessibility

The Disability Discrimination Act states that all services should be made accessible to people suffering from disabilities. In the UK there are:

• Over 7 million people with literacy problems
• Over 1 million people with learning difficulties (source: The Cabinet Office)
• An estimated 6% of the population with severe dyslexia (source: Dyslexia Institute 2003)
• 8.6 million registered disabled people (14% of the population) (source: Disability Rights Commission)
• 2 million UK residents with a sight problem (4% of the population) (source: RNIB )
• 12 million people aged 60 or over, who may have developed sight issues (21% of the UK population) (source: National Statistics)

At Douglas Silas Solicitors we try to keep the needs of our visitors in mind at all times. We are committed to providing accessible online services. Our website is designed to follow the guidelines issued by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and remove barriers to accessibility.

As a way of avoiding difficulties, we have chosen to have very few graphics on our site and made the text larger than you would normally find on websites. Our pages have also been designed to print out easily.

Our website uses a text to speech software called Talklets. This is a speech-enabling tool which makes our website more accessible to people with visual impairments and other reading difficulties. Although the voice is computer-generated, we believe that it is close enough to human speech to make it understandable. To use this tool please click on the Text Reader icon located above the text on the screen. This will open a Textic toolbar. Press play to listen to the whole page, or highlight to highlight only certain parts of the page. You  can also save selected text as an MP3 file for listening to later on your digital music player.

To learn more read our webpage called: Listen To This Website

TEXT SIZE

This website can be optimised for people with reading difficulties or visual impairments. Most browsers already offer zoom features. To change text size, choose 'View' on your browser, then select 'Text Size' and click the size you require Unselecting the option will return text to its original size.. You can also try Ctrl + to zoom in, and Ctrl - to zoom out. Alternatively, hold 'control' down and at the same time use the scroll button on your mouse to adjust text size.

HIGHLIGHTING

Talklets attempts to offer the most useful highlighting features it can, based on which browser you are using, and whether or not you are using ‘HotKeys’, or ‘Point Out Loud’, as well as the structure of the page and content being read. Where possible and appropriate, it will highlight the words being read, as they are read. The highlighting colour can be selected via the toolbar.

OTHER USEFUL THINGS TO KNOW

• Severely visually impaired and blind users: HotKeys features on Talklets are designed to allow content navigation and form filling. Features of significant importance, are likely to be HotKeys and the Smart Story Finder.
• Partially sighted users and users with fading eyesight: We recommend trying the Point-out-loud features of Talklets, which allow users to move the mouse over an element and hear its text spoken aloud. Also the Zoom features may be useful.
• Dyslexic users and others who struggle to read: We recommend trying the Point-out-loud features of Talklets, which allow users to move the mouse over an element and hear its text spoken aloud. Also the Zoom features may be useful.

Reading selected text may also be a comfortable interface to use. As well as double clicking to read. We also highly recommend using the word by word highlighting.

FOREIGN LANGUAGE USERS

We recommend trying the Point-out-loud features of Talklets. Also looking up words in the dictionary, by right clicking on them and clicking the first link in the menu that appears.

PROFICIENT READERS

You can quickly double click on the start of a story or passage you want to listen to, and open a new tab or window in your browser. You can carry on browsing the web, checking your email, whatever you like, whilst listening to your chosen content. Or download articles to your mp3 player, to listen on the go.

OTHER ACCESSIBILITY FEATURES

• We do not use frames.
• We use alternative text (alt text) to describe the content of pictures.
• We have increased contrast between background and text for readability.
• Fields in online forms can be navigated with the keyboard 'Tab' key.
• We avoid colour combinations that may make the pages less accessible to people with colour blindness.

If you come across any pages on this site which do not appear to conform to accessibility standards, please let us know

If you come across any pages on this site which do not appear to conform to accessibility standards, please let us know

Back to top