Accessibility
The Ministry of Defence is committed to making its corporate website www.mod.uk easily accessible to all sections of the public, in line with the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (c. 50).
The site aspires to the following web standards:
- W3C WAI Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0 Conformance Level Double A or WCAG 2.0 equivalent where applicable
- Valid W3C XHTML 1.0 Transitional
- Valid W3C CSS 2.0
Accessibility is defined as the ability of people with disabilities to perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with websites.
The www.mod.uk website mostly conforms to W3C WAI's WCAG 1.0 , Conformance Level Double A .
The website supports text-only browser and speech browser navigation using a keyboard rather than a mouse. The standard screen display of colours and text sizes can be altered to different combinations.
All existing content produced by authorised publishers, and new, updated, and existing content provided for our site by third-party developers, will conform to WCAG 1.0 Conformance Level Double A or WCAG 2.0 Conformance Level Double A equivalent where applicable, by end December 2009, in line with Cabinet Office recommendations for government websites.
All users should be able to:-
- Find out how to contact the Ministry of Defence via telephone, email or letter
- Navigate the site easily to find the information they require
- Use the Search and Advanced Search features to find relevant information
- Access the Freedom of Information home page, Publication scheme and Disclosure log
- Access ‘Help’ pages
- Access ‘Accessibility’ information
- Access ‘Your Privacy’ information
- Access images, video and sound content through text equivalents
- Complete and submit forms
We operate within a devolved publishing environment and thus we cannot check in detail whether all site contents are fully accessible. We can only be certain that the core site design meets all access needs where we have had feedback from a wide range of users.
We would therefore be especially interested to hear from site users who have special access needs about their experience of using the site.
Please email us using the Contact us form in the Related Pages.
Software to open documents
This website provides links to documents in portable document format (PDF). You may need special software to read these files. The link "Tips on using PDFs" on the right will enable you to download free software to allow you to open these files.
Text to Speech
www.mod.uk is speech enabled using Browsealoud, a free plugin which reads web pages aloud.
Browsealoud currently supports the following browsers:
- IE4 upwards
- All MSN versions
- All Compuserve versions
- All AOL versions
- Mozilla
- Firefox
- Netscape 4 upwards
To begin using browsealoud to read content from www.mod.uk download the free plug-in.
Users of Apple's Safari browser should use the built in Text to Speech function.