The London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games are for everyone, everywhere, regardless of ability, age, language or background.
Our website is one of the main ways that people will find out about and share the excitement of the Games, and we want to ensure that everyone can use it.
If you’d like to know the principles we’re working to, read on. But if you’re looking for practical help in using this site, visit our Using this site page.
Including everyone
Our accessibility strategy has a broader reach than the groups traditionally covered in the area of ‘accessibility’. Quite simply, we want to be as inclusive as we can. We therefore consider the needs of:
- People with visual, hearing or motor impairments;
- People with cognitive impairments;
- People with reading difficulties such as dyslexia;
- People whose mother tongue is not English;
- People from different cultural and socio-economic backgrounds;
- People from different generations.
Our aims
New media technologies are always changing, but we are committed to the following broad principles:
Guidelines
- Providing help in using the site: offering help and advice to guide users in customising their computers.
- Designing for use with assistive technologies: ensuring that our media work well with technologies such as software that reads pages aloud.
- Following standards: London 2012 websites should comply with accessibility standards in commissioning, editorial, design and coding. These standards include the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative and the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA, part three).
- Testing: we work with specialist accessibility consultancies and real users with different needs to ensure that any problems are identified and solutions developed.
- Innovating: looking for new ways of offering rich media in an accessible way and helping the development of technologies and standards for accessibility.
The accessibility guidelines we follow include:
The bigger picture
- Allowing users to control text sizes.
- Using an easy to read font type.
- Ensuring suitable foreground and background colour contrast.
- Using clear and simple grammar.
- Providing meaningful text equivalents for pictures.
- Providing simple, consistent site navigation.
- Ensuring the target of each link is clearly defined.
- Providing a sitemap.
- Providing navigational shortcuts for users of text only browsers and page readers. - Using appropriate structural mark-up to maximise browser support.
- Ensuring all content and functionality is available to users without content style sheet (CSS), image and script support.
Our New Media Accessibility policy is part of our broader commitment to accessible design, and to equality and diversity in general.
This ranges from ensuring a fair and representative group of people in our workforce and suppliers, to making sure that everyone will find the Olympic Park and venues easy to get around.
Contact us
Although we are testing this site on an ongoing basis, it’s your experience which counts, and we will try hard to solve problems as we become aware of them.
So let us know if there are things you find difficult or if you have constructive feedback. Email us with your comments.
