Accessibility

This website is designed to be as accessible and easy to use as possible. We want all users to be able to access the information on this site, including people with sight problems, or hearing, mobility or cognitive impairments.

A student uses screen reading technology at the School of Information & Technology for the Visually Impaired in Dhaka, Bangladesh (Photo: Amanda Lasik/The Advocacy Project, Creative Commons via Flickr)

A student uses screen reading technology at the School of Information & Technology for the Visually Impaired in Dhaka, Bangladesh (Photo: Amanda Lasik/The Advocacy Project, Creative Commons via Flickr)

This page describes some of the accessibility guidelines that we have followed when developing IIED's website.

Code and design

The code used to build this website complies with the guidelines on accessibility issued by the World Wide Web Consortium, the international community which develops web standards. We are working to ensure that any additional elements on this site also comply with accessibility standards.

This site uses cascading style sheets (CSS) for visual layout, which facilitates the use of screen readers. The site also uses relative font sizes, which means that users can specify different text sizes in visual browsers.

This website has a responsive design that adapts automatically to the size of the screen on which it is being displayed.

Keyboard shortcuts – access keys

Access keys are keyboard combinations that let you focus on any particular part of a page without using a mouse. We have chosen not to set up access keys on this site because doing so may conflict with any personal access keys that you may have set up on your computer.

Navigation and search

The main navigation menu appears at the top of every page to enable easy access to key sections of the site.

Links are highlighted in blue text and are underlined. We try to ensure that the link text describes what is being linked to. This allows you to decide whether to open links. To help people who use screen readers, we aim to ensure that the link text makes sense when taken out of context.

A search box is available at the top of all pages, allowing you to type in your search terms and search the site.

An additional search for solely publications is available from our Publications Library.

Images

All images with relevant content are published with 'alt text', a tag that provides text information about the image. This text can be read by screen readers and is displayed instead of the image in browsers that don't load images.

Purely decorative images on the site don't have an alt text tag. This means that screen readers will ignore them.

Language

Every effort is made to ensure that the English used in this site is clear, simple and straightforward to read. We also translate content into different languages where key audiences for that content use those languages.

Getting detailed help with using websites

There are many ways in which you can customise your computer to help with specific needs. The BBC has a very useful website called My Web My Way that provides information about how you can change your computer settings and use assistive technologies. 

The site includes guidance about:

Technical help

For information on technical issues such as accessing different types of media files, please visit our technical information page.

Contact us

If you find any aspect of this site difficult to use, please contact us to provide feedback. We are working towards implementing higher levels of accessibility in the future development of this site. Your feedback can help us do this.