This page provides some guidance about finding your way round our home page. It also provides information and advice to help you to access the website.
Navigating our Home Page
The home page includes 13 blocks or sections. There is a search box in the top right hand corner if you want to search for a particular topic. Please note that the search field works best with a single search term e.g. visual impairment.
The sections in the home page are:
- Hero image with text “Achieving independence for blind and deaf people. NESS is an independent local charity delivering the first integrated joint sensory services in Scotland”
- A drop down box containing a Welcome Video in British Sign Language for Deaf British Sign Language users
- A row of three Calls to Action. Please note, these will change periodically
- Our latest news item with a link to all of our news stories
- Two or three up and coming events with a link to the Events page. Each event item has a link to further information about it.
- Two spotlight sections, the content of which will change periodically
- Sign up area for our NESS News, our quarterly newsletter about what’s going on at NESS and relevant news stories and a for NESS Community, a quarterly newsletter about fundraising.
The footer of the website contains the following links:
One the left, there is a link to our entry on the Companies House with our Company Limited by Guarantee number, and below it a link to our entry on the OSCR website with our charity number.
In the centre, are our main contact details, and on the right hand of the footer, links to our Accessibility page, Contact Us page, Privacy Notice, and Terms and Conditions.
Accessibility features
We have tried to make our website as accessible as possible so that it can be accessed in the way that you need to access it. We believe that the accessibility is built into the way our website has been written, structured and designed. The following features apply:
- Black text on white background
- Alt text included for all images and videos
- Styles sheets and headings used for web pages for ease of use by speech programmes
- Layouts that support the use of magnification software
- Plain English text
- British Sign Language (BSL) videos included where possible
- All videos containing speech have subtitles
Help accessing our website
The NESS website is designed to work with screen readers and magnification software such as Zoomtext. When using magnification, it will move to the mobile set up so all the content is in a column and accessed via a burger (three horizontal lines) menu. If you do not have added software for speech or magnification and are finding it difficult to read our website, the BBC’s “My web my way” pages show how you can change the settings on your computer to:
- Use speech software
- Change the size and style of the font
- Change the colour of the text and the background colour
- Switch subtitles on YouTube videos on or off
Feedback
We are committed to making sure our website is as accessible as possible and have taken care at every stage of the website design to test the website. We recognise that there will be improvements that can be made and welcome any comments or feedback that would help improve the NESS website. You can share comments or feedback about the website via our Contact Us page.
