Accessibility

Our website is for everyone. It has been designed to be accessible for the widest possible audience regardless of their ability. This includes making access as easy as possible for people with disabilities who may have special needs.

Choose from the following:

• How do people with disabilities use the website
• W3C validation service
• Double A standard
• Website evaluation tools
• Useful accessibility links
• Font sizes and how to change their size
• Access keys
• Reading PDF documents
• Contact details

How do people with disabilities use the website

People with disabilities, such as a visual impairment, may use assistive technologies to use the Internet. Assistive technologies are products used by people with disabilities to help accomplish tasks that they cannot do easily otherwise.

Assistive technology comes in many different forms, some of these include:

• speech synthesis (speech output)
• alternative keyboards or switches
• Braille
• screen magnifiers
• sound notification
• screen readers
• speech recognition
• text browsers
• voice browsers

Our website has been built so that people using the technologies listed above can access and use the information available.

Although we use tables for layout and in places, for tabulating information, care has been taken to make sure they are made accessible.

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W3C validation service

This website is built using code compliant with World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards for XHTML and cascading style sheets (see below). W3C is the governing authority on web development standards and practices. The site displays correctly with current browsers, and using standard XHTML code means that any future browsers will also display this website correctly.

XHTML stands for ‘eXtensible Hyper Text Markup Language’ which is the language or ‘coding’ used to write web pages. It contains information about the page’s structure, appearance and contents. 

Cascading  Style Sheets (CSS) - CSS is a simple mechanism for adding style, for example fonts, colours and spacing to web documents.

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Double A standard

This website conforms to the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) level AA (double A).

For a full list of the checkpoints that we have addressed to reach this standard and make our web content accessible to people with disabilities, please see the guidelines area of the WAI website.

We have, for example, addressed the following accessibility issue:

• provided equivalent alternatives to audio and visual content
• made sure that text and graphics are understandable when viewed without colour
• made sure that pages are accessible even when newer technologies are not supported or turned off
• we are committed to our website being accessible to all of our users, and will continue to carry out further improvements

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Website evaluation tools

We're using Bobby and Sitemorse to help us make our site more accessible. Bobby and Sitemorse are web based tools that analyse web pages for their accessibility to people with disabilities as many people with disabilities use special web browsers. These tools make suggestions on how to improve coding on web pages to make the website more accessible.

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Useful links

• UK Government Disability Site - contains full information about the Disabilities Discrimination Act, parts of which apply to the web
• Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB) - the RNIB is there to help not only totally blind people, but also the one and a half million in the UK with serious sight problems
• The Adobe website - to download the acrobat reader for reading PDF files
• Access Adobe - to read PDF files using a screen reader
• Bobby - for website evaluation
• Sitemorse - for website evaluation

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Font sizes and how to change their size

If the text is too small to read you need to reset your text size.

• Internet Explorer 4 or earlier
  select 'Fonts' from the View menu and select the text size you want to use
• Internet Explorer 5 and 6
  select 'Text Size' from the View menu in Internet Explorer 5 and 6, and select the text size you want to use
• Netscape 4.x
  Select ‘Increase Font’ or ‘Decrease Font’ on the View menu
  
• Netscape 6.x
  Select ‘Text Size’ on the View menu, and then select a size

Look for similar functions in other browsers

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Access keys

The London Fire website makes use of access keys to assist in your navigation around the site. You can use the access keys listed below to jump to certain areas of the site easily by typing ALT+accesskey (Windows) or CTRL+accesskey (Macintosh).

Internet Explorer users may have to hit the enter key to activate a link.

London Fire access keys:

1 - Home Page
2 - What's New
3 - A-Z Index
4 - Search
5 - FAQs
6 - Help
7 - Compliments & Complaints
8 - Terms & Conditions
9 - Feedback
0 - Accessibility
s - Skip to Main Content on Page
n - Skip to Navigation
r - Skip to Second Level Navigation
p - Print Friendly Version

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Reading PDF documents

You can read PDF files using Access Adobe software, which can convert pdf files to html files. The access.adobe.com site has further details.

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Contact us

If you have any problems accessing any information on the site, please email the web team.

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