Clinical Solutions - decisions for health. Delivering 24 hour access to healthcare to over 100 million people via our technology, products, content and clinical decision support.

Accessibility

Every effort has been made to ensure maximum accessibility by applying standards-compliant design to the production of this website.

Standards-compliant design

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), along with other groups and standards bodies, has established technologies for creating and interpreting web-based content. These technologies, which are called “web standards”, are carefully designed to deliver the greatest benefits to the greatest number of web users while ensuring the long-term viability of any document published on the web.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and xHTML

CSS is a simple but powerful mechanism for defining the style and presentation (fonts, colours, margins and borders) of web documents. xHTML combines the power and versatility of XML (Extensible Markup Language) with the familiar web language of HTML. xHTML is the next version of HTML and is designed to allow for richer web pages capable of displaying on a widening range of browser platforms, including mobile phones, PDAs and televisions.

Site accessibility features

This site employs many features to make information more accessible:

All images have text alternates (ALT attributes).
Pages are organised to be fully functional, even with JavaScript turned off.
All text uses relative font sizes so text can be enlarged or reduced using the text size options available in visual browsers.
The site can be navigated without the use of a mouse (see ‘Access Keys’).
All pages use flexible page formats so pages can be automatically resized for different window sizes and screen resolutions.
Page formatting is achieved with CSS to ensure that the semantic structure of the information is preserved.
This site follows World Wide Web Consortium recommendations and accessibility guidelines.

Metadata

Metadata has been added to all pages to provide important orientation information to users. The metadata provided includes:

a meaningful page title;
the document language;
a !DOCTYPE statement to validate to a published formal grammar;
a description of the site’s content;
keywords describing the site’s contents.

Browsers

You will be able to best experience this site and take full advantage of its features by using a standards-compliant browser. The following browsers support numerous web standards including CSS, xHTML and the DOM (a universal means of controlling the behaviour of web pages):

Microsoft Internet Explorer 8
(IE6 and IE7 are not standards-compliant but the site will still operate
in these browsers)
Mozilla Firefox
Safari
Camino
Mozilla
Opera

Browser support & testing

This website has been tested with the following browsers.

Browser	Version	OS	OS Version
Internet Explorer	8.0	Windows Vista
Internet Explorer	7.0	Windows XP	5.1
Internet Explorer	6.0	Windows XP	5.1
Mozilla Camino	2006021400 (1.0)	Mac OS X	10.4.8
Mozilla Firefox	2.0	Mac OS X	10.4.8
Mozilla Firefox	1.5.0.1	Mac OS X	10.4.8
Mozilla Netscape	7.1	Mac OS X	10.4.8
OmniWeb	4.5	Mac OS X	10.4.8
Opera	9.0	Mac OS X	10.4.8
Safari	2.0.3	Mac OS X	10.4.8
Variations in performance and/or visual styling may exist from browser to browser depending on the operating system and the browser’s support for CSS.

JavaScript

This site may use JavaScript to improve site design, aid user–interaction and validate forms. The use of JavaScript has been carefully considered and implemented so that it does not negatively impact site accessibility. In particular, we have worked to:

ensure the JavaScript is directly accessible;
provide an accessible, non-JavaScript alternative when JavaScript cannot be made natively accessible;
use device-independent event handlers;
ensure that normal browser functionality is not modified in a way that may cause confusion or inaccessibility.

Bandwidth considerations and processor speed

Efforts have been made to ensure that this website is as bandwidth-friendly as possible. However, your experience here will be enhanced if you access this site with a fast connection to the Internet (DSL, ISDN, Cable, T-1 etc.) and a computer operating at 500MHz or faster.

Site navigation

A consistent navigation structure has been provided on all pages of this site. The navigation bar may be used as an indication of which section of the site you are currently viewing. The selected link is clearly highlighted in the navigation bar.

Links are displayed clearly and in context. The ‘title’ tag is used to provide additional information about links where necessary. This additional information may be viewed in some browsers when your mouse hovers over the link. Some screenreaders may also take advantage of this information.

Access Keys

Access Keys have been implemented throughout the site. Access Keys allow you to activate a link using only your keyboard. A full list of the Access Keys used on this site is provided on the Access Keys page.

Use of text

Most navigation elements are plain text and we have provided text alternatives to graphics on the site.

Users who wish to increase the size of the text on screen may do so under the ‘View’ selection on the browser’s main menu, you should find an option called ‘Text Zoom’, ‘Text Magnification’, ‘Text Size’ or ‘Font Size’. From that point it should be relatively simple to find and select an additional sub menu option that adjusts text size to your needs.

Visual design and encoding

This site uses Cascading Style Sheets for visual layout. In this way, structure is separated from design. The use of Cascading Style Sheets allows users to apply their own style sheets. The site may, however, be viewed without stylesheets. No information is lost when stylesheets are disabled.

Relative values are used for all measurements, including font size. This allows the site to adjust to the user’s screen size. It also allows the user to set his/her own preferred font size.

This site was designed to take full advantage of version 6+ browsers. However, the site may also be viewed using version 4 browsers. While it is possible to view the site on both these browser groups without any loss of information, there will be some visual differences due to varying browser support for Cascading Style Sheets.

Colour

The site has been designed using colours that should provide enough contrast for users who suffer from colour blindness.

Images

This site’s interface makes carefully considered use of images and where images do appear, they include text alternates to enhance accessibility.

Content

This site makes use of xHTML tags that provide additional information about structural items. These are used to add summary descriptions to tables, explain hierarchy within tables, provide emphasis on words and phrases, provide an explanation of abbreviations and add structure to forms. These tags are often hidden from visual browsers but provide valuable information to non-visual browsers.

Lists

Many lists have title attributes which describe the content of the list in greater detail. Elements are marked up as lists if they follow a logical, structured order.

Links

Many links have title attributes which describe the link in greater detail, unless the text of the link already fully describes the target (such as the headline of an article or name of a person). Links are written to make sense out of context.

References

Accessibility software

JAWS, a screen reader for Windows.
Home Page Reader, a screen reader for Windows.
Lynx, a free text-only web browser for blind users with refreshable Braille displays.
Links, a free text-only web browser for visual users with low bandwidth.
Opera, a visual browser with many accessibility-related features.

- Healthcare at Home exceeds targets through Clinical Solutions’ IntefleCS Home Clinic.
20-24 February 2012 Clinical Solutions will be attending the event on stand 1352 at HIMSS12, Venetian Sands Expo Center, Las Vegas, USA

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