Accessibility
Accessibility
The Health Service Executive policy on web accessibility requires that all HSE related sites be at least minimally accessible to our visitors with disabilities.
Our definition of minimal accessibility is based upon the World Wide Web Consortium's guidelines "Web Content Accessibility Guidelines" (WCAG). WCAG defines three levels of checkpoint priority. The site you are currently viewing has WAI-A compliance.
Graphics
breastfeeding.ie provides text equivalents for non-text elements. The ALT attribute is used on all images, and images are only used when necessary.
Long descriptions are used for images that convey information beyond simply raw text; such as an organization chart or a data graph. These can be accessed by clicking the 'd' under the graphic.
Colour
breastfeeding.ie does not rely upon colour.
The website designer's use of colored text or images to convey information is not the only way in which that information is conveyed. People who have difficulty identifying colour will still be able to use the site as other means of identifying heading etc. have also been used.
The web site relies heavily upon stylesheets for visual presentation. However, the pages can still be used without CSS.
Language
breastfeeding.ie uses plain, understandable English.
Tables
breastfeeding.ie ensures that table markup is only used for data tables.
For tables that express tabular information -- content laid out in columns and rows -- XHTML 1.0 Strict's features that associate cell content with column and row headers have been used.
For more on this, see the XHTML 1.0 Strict Specification
