Accessibility Statement

Erwin Mediation Services is committed to ensuring that this website is accessible to everyone. If you have any questions or suggestions regarding the accessibility of this site, please contact us, as I am continually striving to improve the experience for all visitors.

Accessibility Features

Screen Readers

Throughout the site, headers have been used extensively and if you are using a recent version of a screen reader, the following keys will help you navigate the site:

H to cycle forwards through the headings
Shift + H to cycle backwards through the headings
1 to navigate to the next level 1 heading (or a number between 1 and 6 to navigate to the next heading on this level)
Shift + 1 to navigate to the previous level 1 heading (or a number between 1 and 6 to navigate to the previous heading on this level)
INSERT + F6 to provide a list of all headings

Skip Navigation

There are two different menus on the site – the main menu which remains the same on every page and a contextual side navigation which changes depending on which main menu selection you have chosen.

To quickly skip over the header and the main menu, and get to the side navigation, "skip links" have been located at the start of every page. To access these from the keyboard, upon entering a page, press the TAB key once and press ENTER. To skip straight to the content on the page, press TAB twice and press ENTER.

Access Keys

No shortcut keys are used. As access keys conflict with browser short cut keys, our policy is not to implement Access Keys.

Large fonts

If you have Javascript enabled, you may change the text size on the site to suit your preference by clicking the A+ (Increase the font size on this page) and A- graphics (Decrease the font size on this page).

If Javascript is disabled, you can change the size of the text by using the Increase Font Size option of your browser (normally under ther View menu option) or by selecting one of the Alternate Stylesheets from A++ to A- (again from your browser menu).

Technical

This section outlines some of the technical decisions which were made while implementing Accessibility Guidelines on the site.

Place-Holding in Form Fields

Although the W3C AAA Guidelines (Checkpoint 10.4) recommend that default place-holding characters are used in edit boxes, this particular checkpoint creates more problems than it solves; particularly as modern user agents now handle empty controls correctly. It is not an oversight that place-holding characters are not used, we have deliberately not addressed this checkpoint to ensure optimum usability.

General approach

The following practices have been adopted throughout the site

Link phrases make sense when read out of context
Tabular data is not found - the site uses table-less HTML
Form controls are explicitly associated with their prompts
Style sheets are used for presentation
Font-sizes and other form elements are specified using relative units of measurement
All pages have been tested with and without scripting enabled
The site has been spellchecked
The site conforms and has been validated to XHTML 4.0 STRICT
Header elements have been used throughout to convey structure
Definition and Unordered lists have been used throughout to semantically structure information
The colour-scheme has been tested for colour contrast and passes AERT and Luminosity tests to W3C recommendations

Every endeavour has been made to ensure that this site is as easy for you to use as is possible. Again please contact us if you have any suggestions or questions.