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Sefton Equalities Partnership take its responsibilities under the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) seriously and recognises that goods and services must be offered on equal terms to all people in the community. We see the use of the website as being a key enabler for disabled users to obtain information and be involved in their local community. We are committed to providing our online services to all sections of the community. Our website design is constantly being improved to follow the accessibility guidelines issued by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB). We are working towards 'AAA' compliance with the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). All new pages added will be AAA compliant.
We are continually updating this site to achieve these standards and details of improvements made will be listed here. Here are some of the things we are already doing to make our site more accessible for everyone: There are many features built into modern web browsers which allow personal preferences to be set - for example the adjustment of colours and text size. These features can usually be found by asking for 'Help' in your browser program and entering the phrase 'accessibility'. The following is a list of some of the actions we have already taken in order to improve accessibility of the SBP website: Please let us know of any accessibility issues you encounter whilst using our web site by emailing
No Access Keys? Based upon advice from Nomensa, recognised Web Accessibility experts, we have decided to no longer provide Access keys on this website. A quote from them: "Access keys are not used by the people who are supposed to use them, and could even hinder people if poorly implemented. The time would be better spent on a technique that is known to work, such as skip links. Although access keys are intended to improve site navigation, it is shown they actually can interfere with web accessibility. In terms of implementing a common standard, it would require a universal understanding of access keys to be applied to every site." Downloads We have used PDF (portable document format) to deliver some content on this website. This is a format which retains the document's original 'look and feel' which may be important for forms and legal documents, or for ensuring appearance on the website is comparable with the printed version. There is a link to the Access Adobe website where you can download a free program which will convert PDF documents to HTML or plain text. We are also pleased to offer users a direct link to Adobe's on-line converter which saves having to download the Access Adobe program; this allows you to enter the URL of a PDF document into an on-line form and just that document will be converted for you. Where Microsoft Office (Word, Excel) documents have been used, we would advise users who do not have Microsoft Office to download the appropriate Office Viewer from Microsoft's site. Changing the settings on your browser We provide here the instructions to change the 'view' settings on the two most common browsers: Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE) and Netscape Navigator. Other graphical browsers work in similar ways. For information about different browsers including those designed for use by disabled people, please follow this link to the Directgov website: Microsoft Internet Explorer version 4 and above: - Select 'View' (version 4) or 'Tools' (version 5 and 6) from the top pull down menu options.
- Select 'Internet Options'.
- From this menu screen you may select the 'Colors' options by clicking on the buttons at the bottom of the screen.
- You can now change the default colour for the background and font.
- 'Use Windows colors' can be deselected by clicking on the box.
- Once this has been done, the text and background selections can be changed by clicking on the boxes themselves.
- Selecting the 'Fonts' button will give you the ability to change the style of font used by your browser.
- Once selected any international character set can be selected and any font resident on your computer can be used.
- The 'Accessibility' button allows you to accept or decline styling put in place by our cascading style sheet (CSS).
- The three options available are to ignore colour, font type and font size declarations.
Netscape Navigator Netscape Navigator approaches things in a slightly different manner but essentially works in the same way as Microsoft Internet Explorer. - Select 'Edit' from the top pull down menu options.
- Select 'Preferences'.
- From this menu screen you may select the 'Colors' option by clicking on the word.
- You can now change the default colour for the background and font.
- 'Use Windows colors' can be deselected by clicking on the box.
- Once this has been done, the text and background selections can be changed by clicking on the boxes themselves.
- Selecting the Fonts option will give you the ability to change the style of font used by your browser.
- Once selected any international character set can be selected and any font resident on your computer can be used.
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Accessibility 
