Accessibility

What is accessibility?

Accessibility is the word used to describe whether a product (for example, a website, mobile site, digital TV interface or application) can be used by people of all abilities and disabilities.

On a website, accessibility depends on how a person's disability affects the way they perceive information on a page and how they navigate within and between pages.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) as defined and managed by the W3C, is a set of guiding principles and engineering considerations designed to improve the experience of the web for individuals with disabilities. The guidelines are divided into three levels (A, AA, AAA) from basic, through intermediate, to advanced.

For more information visit the W3C website.

Our aims

At USS we want all our members to be able to use this website, including people with sight, hearing and physical disabilities. Our current aim is to achieve AA Level, and we've made some great progress, but we realise there’s still more to do and will continue to listen to feedback and make further improvements.

What we do

Within our website we:

• Only use strong colour contrasts.
• Use headings correctly to make them readable through screen readers.
• Create links that do what they say. We don't use ‘click here’.
• Use tables which are laid out in a tabular format with headings.
• Use style sheets to determine the presentation of our website - this assists those using screen reading devices.
• Provide alternative text for images, so that those people who cannot see the image can read the text. This alternative text can be read by screen reading devices.
• Create captions for our videos.
• Utilise keyboard shortcuts and tabbing to make it easy to navigate pages.

What isn’t accessible still

We currently have a number of PDF documents within the website and these won’t be fully accessible. However, where possible we’re replacing these with web pages instead.

Supported browsers

To be able to make the most use out of uss.co.uk please use one of the supported browsers: