University Vacancies Ireland is dedicated to meeting the needs of people with disabilities, and recognises the importance of complying with accessibility standards. We also recognise the challenge and benefits of creating a Web site that focuses not only on complying with standards, but on delivering an excellent online experience to the widest possible audience, including older people and users with disabilities.

As far as possible, we aim that the Web site is:

• technically accessible, in that it is possible for all users to access all information and functionality;
• equally usable, in that it is not prohibitively difficult or time consuming for users with disabilities to carry out normal tasks;
• capable of being adapted or configured by individual users to meet their specific needs and preferences;
• capable of interfacing with appropriate, widely available assistive technologies employed by users.

Standards Compliance

As a minimum standard, all pages are designed to meet all Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0, Level A & Level AA Success Criteria, the target rating which public sector bodies should achieve. However, we aim to achieve as many of the guidelines from levels 1, 2 and 3 as practical in the design and implementation of the Web site.

The Web site uses structured semantic markup. h1 tags are used for main titles. h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 tags are used for subtitles.

The Web site uses Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for visual layout. This ensures that content is perfectly linearised and improves performance on a wide range of browsers and other user agents.

Pages are designed to validate as XHTML 1.0 Strict. There are still some pages that cause validation errors: work is ongoing to fix these.

An independent accessibility audit was carried out on the templates used to build the site. These validated to a high level of compliance. Work is ongoing to implement changes to deal with all issues discovered.

Maintaining accessibility

To help deliver and maintain an accessible website, University Vacancies Ireland has created internal guidelines to guide Web administrators and authors in the creation of accessible Web content.

These guidelines cover issues such as

• Creating user friendly Web content
• Writing meaningful alternative text
• Creating accessible tables
• Creating accessible forms
• Creating accessible link phrases.

Content authors receive training to raise awareness of accessibility issues.