Accessibility

Accessibility Statement

This page states our intention to ensure that our website is usable and accessible to all users regardless of their disability, and details some of the measures taken. This website's objectives are to conform to the Guidelines for UK government websites, which support the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0, Level AA, to ensure a web accessibility standard has been achieved and is maintained.

This accessibility statement applies only to the arvato government services website at www.arvatogov.co.uk and not to any site that is linked from one of our pages.

Access keys

The UK Government Access Keys Standard has been applied to this site. This provides a keyboard shortcut for users wishing to go directly to specific parts of the site and help those who do not use a pointing device, such as a mouse. A subset of the standard has been used and the access keys are defined as follows:

S - Skip navigation
1 - Home page
3 - Site map
4 - Search this site
9 - Feedback about this website
0 - Access keys used on this website

How to use access keys

Access keys work slightly differently depending on which browser and type of computer you are using - this is a summary of the main different ways:

If you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 on a PC, press 'alt' and the access key character at same time
If you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer 5,6,7 on a PC, press 'alt' and the access key character at the same time, then press the enter key
If you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 or Firefox on an Apple Macintosh, press 'control' and the access key character at the same time
If you are using Firefox on a PC, press 'shift', 'alt' and the access key character at the same time
This accessibility initiative is also supported by Netscape 6; use the 'alt' key on a PC, or the 'ctrl' key on an Apple Macintosh

Navigation

A hidden menu has been placed at the beginning of each page to allow screen reader users to link to the main areas of the page.

Headings and navigation menus

HTML heading tags are used to convey document structure. H1 tags are used for main titles and H2 and H3 tags for subtitles.

Navigation menus are marked up as HTML lists. This ensures that the number of links in the list is read out at the start and it can be skipped easily.

Images

All images used in this site include descriptive alt tag attributes.

Stylesheets

This site uses cascading style sheets for visual layout. If your browser or browsing device does not support stylesheets at all, the use of structured semantic mark up ensures that the content of each page is still readable and clearly structured.

Forms and fields

Most form fields also have 'label' and 'id' attributes to explicitly associate the form field with its label to allow for easy entry of data.

Alternative Text

All images on this site are accompanied by a brief alternative text which where appropriate identifies an image or its function. This alternative text (alt-text) is generally only visible when the browser's automatic image loading feature is turned off.

Links

All text links are written so that they make sense when read out of context.

PDFs

PDF files can be read using Adobe Reader software, which is available for many different computer systems including Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Palm. Visit the Adobe website to obtain the Adobe Reader software.

More help

For more information and help about changing your browser settings please visit the BBC's My Web My Way pages.

Tell us what you think

We've tried very hard to make our website as easy to use as possible. But we know that it's an ongoing job.

Please contact us if you have any comments or suggestions on how we can make improvements.