The Disability Discrimination Act places an obligation on all service providers to ensure that they take reasonable steps to provide access to their services for people with disabilities.
People with disabilities - for example those whose hearing and/or vision is impaired - may use specially designed software or hardware to access content on the internet.
As a first step in making the website for the Archdiocese of Southwark accessible to all, we have worked through the pages on the website to make sure that they follow the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) guidelines on using cascading style sheets and valid markup with correctly declared Document Properties and character encoding. This ensures that our pages are "interoperable" - that is to say that they will be usable in all programs that are written to interpret standard markup - including those that are designed to help people with disabilities.
There are still many other things that can be done - awareness of disability is driving some important technical advances for web designers. We hope, however, that we have made a good start.
The "Valid XHTML 1.0" and "Valid CSS" links in the footer of each page are not simply a technical issue. They are an indication of our desire to make these web pages accessible to all.
Valid XHTML 1.0 - Valid CSS - Website designed by Fr Tim Finigan.
The Archdiocese of Southwark is a Registered Charity No. 235468