Accessibility

We are committed to ensuring that the website can be accessed by all our members. Our website has been designed to be compliant with the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) standards.

Access

We are committed to ensuring that the website can be accessed by all our members. Our website has been designed to be compliant with the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) standards. We have clear and consistent navigation throughout the site.

Font sizes

Throughout our website we have used font sizes that are user controllable, meaning visitors can control the size of the text displayed via their web browser. However, we do recommend that for optimum viewing, the default browser text size is set to ‘Medium/Normal’.

To adjust the text size in Internet Explorer, select the View menu, then Text size; you can then choose your preferred text size from ‘Smallest’ to ‘Largest’.

To adjust the text in Mozilla Firefox, select the View menu, then zoom, then zoom in.

Images

All informative images on our website use ‘Alt’ tags that display an alternative description of the image. These descriptions of the images allow software such as screen readers to read out a description of the image to visually impaired users.

Adobe PDF documents

This website uses PDF documents to convey some information; these are recognised by the inclusion of a graphical download icon after the link to the PDF document. In order to view these documents you will need to have Adobe Acrobat Reader software installed. If you do not have this already then please click here to visit Adobe’s website where you will be able to download the latest version free of charge.

In order for PDF documents to be accessible, Adobe provide a number of tools to help convert PDF content into a more accessible format. These tools can be found by following the link above.

Web accessibility

At the International Cotton Association, we have taken every step to ensure our website conforms to Level AA compliance of the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), including all Priority 1, Priority 2 and Priority 3 checkpoints included in the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (WCAG 1.0) . This exceeds the legally required level of Level A and makes sure that the website is accessible to a wide customer market.

The majority of pages within the website meet Priority 1, Priority 2 and Priority 3 checkpoints for Level AAA, however, a small number of pages do not yet comply with this level. We are striving to adjust these pages in order that they meet the criteria for Level AAA.

We try to ensure that our pages continue to comply with these standards and if you feel that there are parts of the site that fail to meet these standards, please let us know

Web standards compliance

We have taken every step to ensure the International Cotton Association website conforms to the HTML web standards set out by the W3C . The website is fully compliant with the current XHTML Transitional web standards.

HTML heading tags

Our website uses HTML standard heading tags to ensure that all pages convey a valid document structure. For example, H1 tags are used for main page titles, H2 tags for section titles and H3 tags are used for sub-section titles.

The navigation menus of our website are set up using html lists, as this ensures the navigation is structured correctly for use with screen reading technology. It also means that the navigation can be tabbed through in a correct and logical order.