Accessibility Statement

This website is updated daily and as such the validation is based on a snapshot at a given point in time. Regular checks are made but continuous compliance with WAI Level 3 cannot always be guaranteed, however, we do our best to work to and in spirit of the guidelines. If any user experiences a problem, please contact us.

Our website is independently assessed.

Standards Compliance

While most accessibility features can be easily measured or tested, there are many which can't or are very difficult to assess. Having checked all the guidelines and tested the site thoroughly and to the best of our knowledge, we believe that all these pages are in compliance.

All pages on this site are tested and WCAG AAA approved. We ensure to the best of our abilities that they meet all applicable priority 1, 2, and 3 guidelines of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. This again, is a judgement call, there are tools to test the various aspects, but much is down to individual interpretation and understanding.

We use the W3.org online validation tool to check each page for errors, this is 100% accurate.

It is also possible for automated accessibility checkers to register "false negatives" or "false positives" due to the type of mark-up on a page so keep this in mind when checking any site with software and also remember that in addition many manual checks also need to occur.

Navigation Aids

All pages have skip links to take the user straight to the main content of the page and bypass any navigation links or groups of links.

Access Keys

We have provided access keys to enable browsing the Blackburn College website without a mouse. Click here to view the Access Keys

Links

Many links have title attributes which describe the link in greater detail, unless the text of the link already fully describes the target (e.g. a headline of an article or an obvious phrase such as "return to the home page").

Links are written so that they make sense out of context. If the user lands on a link and hasn't read the surrounding text, we endeavour to make sure they know where the link will take them and what to expect when they arrive on the designated page.

Images

All content images used in this site include descriptive ALT attributes. Purely decorative graphics include null ALT attributes.  Complex images (where applicable) include LONGDESC attributes or inline descriptions to explain the significance of each image to non-visual readers.

Visual Design Elements

This site uses cascading style sheets for visual layout.

This site uses only relative font sizes, compatible with the user-specified "text size" option in visual browsers.

If your browser or browsing device does not support stylesheets at all, the content of each page is still readable, this is regularly tested. Each page contains a link to a text version of the page formatted for "screen reader" software and with high contrast between text and graphics for the visually impaired.

Accessibility References

W3 accessibility guidelines, which explains the reasons behind each guideline.

W3 accessibility techniques, which explains how to implement each guideline.

W3 accessibility checklist, a busy developer's guide to accessibility.

U.S. Federal Government Section 508 accessibility guidelines.