Definitions

Something that is accessible is defined as "easy to approach, reach, enter, speak with, or use". Wikipedia contains a useful article on Web Accessibility at wikipedia web accessibility.

Observatory

The Observatory is committed to ensure that this website can be accessed and used effectively by everyone. We have followed UK Government web guidelines as well as national and international standards.

We have kept the design of our Observatory website simple, easy and accessible as possible. Some specific areas of focus are:

Graphics

The use of excessive graphics have been avoided where possible to maximise speedier downloading times and to create accessible information which cannot be read if in image format.

Images and Alt Tags

Where images are used we have added 'Alt' tags - text alternatives so that you will still know what the image is meant to convey even if it doesn't load or if you have chosen to browse with the images switched off or you are using an assistive technology like a screen reader to browse the web page rather than view.

Coding standards and Double-A conformance

This website is built using code compliant with World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards for XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets. W3C is the governing authority on web development standards and practices.

The site displays with current browsers, and using standard code should mean that any future browsers will also display this website correctly.

We are continuously improving this website to ensure that pages conform to the Single-AA level of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0. The Accessibility Guidelines will explain how to make web content accessible to people with disabilities. Conformance to these Guidelines helps to make the web more accessible to users with disabilities and benefits all users.

Downloadable Documents

Word Icon Adobe Icon Excel Icon

The majority of the documents available can be downloaded in either Adobe PDF format, Word or Excel.

We are currently working towards making our documents available in other formats, to help make sure that they are accessible for everyone. Some documents are available in Rich Text Format (RTF). An RTF document can be viewed using any word-processing software.

PDF’s

PDF (Portable Document Format) is a suitable format for documents on a website. A PDF file can contain vast amounts of content or images in a more user-friendly way than a webpage.

To open PDF files, you need a viewer called Adobe Reader. This small program is available to PC and Mac users alike and is free to download from the Adobe website. Adobe website,

Where possible, we keep the file size of our PDFs under two megabytes, so you should not wait a long time for a document to download.