UWS Web Accessibility Statement

UWS is committed to improving the levels of accessibility for all users of the UWS website. A new design for the UWS website is progressively being rolled out which complies with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 with the aim to meet the 'AA' ratings. The following features have been built into the design templates which can be viewed at the Equity and Diversity website:

Cascading Style Sheet
The development and roll-out of a new set of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for the UWS website.

Form Labels
Labels have been used for input elements in forms.

Images
Meaningful alt attributes are added to images published on the UWS website.

Links
A 'Skip to content' link has been added, which can be read by screen readers, text-based browsers (e.g. Lynx) and also users who have turned styles off in their graphical web browser.

Links which open in a new window are labelled with the external link image  (CSS enabled) and ( opens in a new window ) (CSS disabled).

Structural Mark Up
Structural mark up has been used throughout the site. Page headings are indicated with h1 followed with subheadings in the order of h2, h3, h4 etc.

Tables
Where tables have been used, table headers and a table summary have been provided.



A number of additional measures are progressively being developed to improve accessibility on the UWS website. These include:

Staff Development
Early next year, the UWS web community will have the opportunity to attend accessibility workshops to ensure they are familiar with the accessibility guidelines and creation of accessible PDFs.

New Pages and Sites
New or updated web material should be reviewed for AA compliance. For existing web pages, the UWS web community will continue to identify areas for improvement in relation to accessibility.

PDF Documents
UWS is working towards ensuring all PDFs published on the UWS website are accessible, provided the user has installed Adobe Acrobat Reader version 5.0 or above and a PDF compatible screen reader. In the meantime, if you have problems accessing a PDF document on the UWS website, please contact the Contact Service Centre on 1300 897 669.

Web Style Guide
A Web Style Guide, currently being produced for the UWS web community, will address accessibility issues.  

Content Management System (CMS)
An Accessibility Checker has been included in the recent CMS upgrade to enable the CMS community to check the accessibility of the content.

The site will be reviewed regularly by the UWS web community. However, if you have problems accessing content on the UWS website, please contact the UWS Contact Services Centre on 1300 897 669.

For more information on web accessibility, please see WAI Resources on Introducing Web Accessibility (opens in a new window).