RQIA is committed to ensuring that this website achieves a high standard of accessibility for the benefit of all our visitors, regardless of disability or impairment and to meet its statutory obligations under the Disability Discrimination Act (1995).

Our accessibility standards adhere to the World Wide Consortium (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 1.0) and to recommendations set out by the e-Government Unit. Currently our site is compliant to WCAG priority 1 (compliance A) standard. Our target is to meet priority level 1 and 2 or AA compliance for all our sites by the end of 2008.

To navigate using your keyboard, please hold down your 'Alt' key (Windows) or 'Ctrl' Key (Apple Macintosh) and press the relevant key from the following list. If you are using an Internet Explorer browser, you will then need to press 'Enter'.

1 - Home
2 - About us
3 - What we do
4 - Publications
5 - Contact us
6 - Accessibility
7 - Glossary
8 - Sitemap

Most browsers have built in accessibility features such as the ability to change the colour of the text, turn off images and stylesheets, increase magnification. For full details, visit the websites of the browser companies.

Microsoft

Apple

Linux

Mozilla Firefox

Some users might find screen text easier to read by increasing the size at which text is displayed. To do this you should simply adjust your browser's settings.

If you use Microsoft Internet Explorer, go to the View menu, select Text Size and then either Larger or Largest.

If you use Netscape Navigator, go to the View menu and choose Increase Font until the text is the size you require.

If you use Firefox, go to the 'View menu', select 'Text Size' and then select 'Increase'. You can have the same effect by using the keyboard and press the keys 'Ctrl' and '+' at the same time.

Documents on this website are provided in Adobe Acrobat PDF (PDF) format. The facility to download Adobe Reader is available on pages where documents are available for download.

Software to open documents:

• Free Adobe Acrobat Reader (for reading PDFs)

We can provide some publications in alternative formats. Please contact Malachy Finnegan at malachy.finnegan@rqia.org.uk for details.

PDF file standards have improved over the years and have become more accessible. However you may come across earlier versions of PDF files on our site which are not so accessible.

Adobe Acrobat Reader version 6 and above has incorporated accessibility features into standard readers. For example, users can hear a PDF document read aloud, or scroll a PDF document automatically. The read aloud feature can also translate the document into a range of European languages. You can access these features in the Edit Preferences menu.

If you use screen reader software (for example an audio-enabled web browser) which is not compatible with Adobe Reader, Adobe provide a free online tool which converts the content of PDF files to a format which can be understood by most screen reader applications.

You can configure your web browser to open PDF files either within the browser window or in a separate Adobe Acrobat window. There are detailed instructions on the Acrobat website on how to do so for different browsers.

Adobe Acrobat Reader is by far the most popular PDF viewer but there are several other viewers available for download that will allow you to view and print PDF documents on a variety of platforms and systems. The following sites may help:

PDF Zone
Planet PDF

All images on this site include descriptive ALT (alternative text) attributes. Those that are purely decorative graphics or used for layout include null ALT attributes.

Abilitynet's My Computer My Way provides good, clear advice on how to customise your browser, operating system or computer to benefit from their accessibility features.

If you have a solution to suggest, please feel free to do so to the RQIA web team.

It would be helpful if your e-mail contained the following:

• the URL(s) (web-address) of the page(s) that you are having difficulties with
• the nature of your disability
• a description of the problem