This accessibility statement applies to www.northerngasnetworks.co.uk and is reviewed at least once a year and updated.
The goal of this website is to guarantee the accessibility of its content and services for individuals with disabilities who require additional access support.
Resources have been dedicated to enhancing the website’s user-friendliness and accessibility, driven by the aligned mission with Recite Me that every individual deserves to experience and engage with digital content, equally.
Conformance status
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) define requirements for designers and developers to improve accessibility for people with disabilities. It defines three levels of conformance: Level A, Level AA, and Level AAA. This website aims to conform with WCAG 2.2 level AA.
Measures to support accessibility
We remain dedicated to the ongoing enhancement of the accessibility of this website and services. This commitment is rooted in the belief that ensuring a smooth, inclusive, and unrestricted experience for individuals with disabilities is a shared ethical responsibility. We’ve taken the following steps to improve the accessibility of our site:
- This site is built using XHTML 1 Transitional
- This site uses Cascading Stylesheets for visual layout and styling
- This site conforms to the W3C’s WCAG guidelines Level 1
- This site uses structured semantic markup. For example, lists are marked up using list elements, headings are marked up as headings.
- All links can be followed in any browser, even if scripting is turned off
- The main body text is sized using relative sizes to allow it to be resized by users of any browser
- With the exception of purely visual elements such as maps, primary content is structured so as to be readable in any browser, regardless of whether it supports images, stylesheets, scripting or plugins.
Third-party content and functionality
We may make use of third-party resources that embed content on our website. Wherever possible we will ensure these are conformant.
What we’re doing to improve accessibility
Our accessibility journey is continuing. We regularly review our website and its content to identify and fix known issues. We do this by running a monthly check of our website with the Recite Me Accessibility Checker.
While we are always striving to enhance the accessibility of all pages and materials on our website, it’s possible that some content has not yet been fully aligned with accessibility standards. This could be attributed to the fact that we may not yet have identified the most suitable fix to improve a user’s experience.
Recite Me assistive technology
We want as many people as possible to be able to use our website. To provide additional support to aid a more inclusive user experience we provide the Recite Me assistive technology tool. This Toolbar enables all website visitors to customise their experience through a range of options to suit their online accessibility and language needs.
The Recite Me toolbar provides text-to-speech functionality, fully customisable styling features, reading aids and a translation tool with over 100 languages, including 65 text-to-speech voices and many other features.
This means that when the toolbar is activated by the user they can:
- Listen to the website using text-to-speech functionality
- Customise background, text and accessibility tool colours
- Modify the font, line height or spacing of text
- Zoom in up to 200% without text spilling off the screen
- The text will reflow in a single column when you change the size of your browser window
- Navigate the website using just a keyboard
- Translate the website into a different language
- Download mp3 files of web page text
- View website pages in text-only mode