Accessibility Statement

BDO is committed to providing a website that is accessible to the widest possible audience, regardless of technology or ability.

We are actively working to increase the accessibility and usability of our website and in doing so adhere to many of the available standards and guidelines.

Web accessibility initiative

This website endeavours to conform to level Double-A of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0.

These guidelines explain how to make web content more accessible for people with disabilities. Conformance with these guidelines will help make the web more user friendly for all people.

For example:

• We include image descriptions where images are not purely decorative.
• We take care to ensure text has good colour contrast ratio and font size for readability.
• We include subtitles on our videos.

W3C standards

This site has been built using code compliant with W3C standards for XHTML and CSS. The site displays correctly in current browsers and using standards compliant XHTML/CSS code means any future browsers will also display it correctly.

Exceptions

Whilst BDO comply with known accessibility and usability guidelines, it is not always possible to do so to the letter of each checkpoint. Browsers and access technologies have outgrown many of the difficulties that once needed guidelines to overcome them, rendering some checkpoints obsolete.

In light of this, we are continually developing solutions that ensure the website conforms to the spirit of each checkpoint, bringing together a high standard of practical accessibility and usability throughout the website. The following exceptions are also in line with the new version of the accessibility guidelines to be released soon.

Pre-filled form fields

Checkpoint 10.4 of WCAG 1.0 recommends that until user agents (such as browsers or screen readers) are capable of recognising text fields that do not contain default text, text fields in forms should be pre-filled with text.

User testing, combined with evidence from web stats, show that this is no longer a necessity for accessibility. Research has in fact shown that pre-filled text fields can cause difficulties for some modern screen readers, therefore we do not include them.

Access keys

Checkpoint 9.5 of WCAG 1.0 recommends providing keyboard shortcuts to important links, often called "access keys". However, these have also caused problems, and testing has demonstrated that they are best left off public websites. We ensure our source code is in a logical order, and ensure content can be tabbed to using a keyboard and we include focus rings. Should you experience any difficulty in accessing the BDO website, please don't hesitate to contact Victoria Lennon.