Accessibility

We at Newcastle Building Society recognise the diverse requirements of all of our customers. We are continuously striving to meet all your needs to the same high level of service, so please let us know if you have any particular requirements and we'll do our best to help.

Our website has been developed with accessibility features to make the information contained in this website available to everyone. This page will detail the various accessibility features that have been built into this site along with any further accessibility information.

Guideline Conformance:

At the time of testing our website conforms to the W3C-WAI Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0. These guidelines explain how to make Web content accessible to people who may have difficulties navigating or reading the content of websites.

Conformance to these Guidelines help make the Web more accessible to everyone.

When we built our website, in addition to conforming to the W3C guidelines, we also built it to conform to the guidelines of Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act which requires agencies and organisations to make information available to everyone.

The conformance level of this website has been validated from five sources:

• The A-Prompt validation program.
• The Bobby online validator.
• The Cynthia automated validator.
• The WebXACT validator.
• Human validation by a number of web developers
.

Validation:

The code used to create this website is valid and correctly used to aid in the site's accessibility.

Browser Compatibility:

Our site is tested on Internet Explorer and Firefox browser platforms. It should also compatible with a number of other browsers offered by other companies.

Updating Your Browser

Although there are a number of web browsers available for you to use, we have built and tested our website using Internet Explorer and FireFox.

If you have either one of these browsers installed, and would like to update it, please select one of the following links and follow the provider's instructions:

Microsoft Internet Explorer or Mozilla FireFox

Text Sizing:

Internet Explorer:

• Click the "View" menu at the top of the browser window.
• Select "Text Size" from the menu.
• In the sub-menu that appears select which text size you want to use, Smallest, Smaller, Medium, Larger, or Largest (Medium is the default).

(doing this may cause some layout elements to display incorrectly)

Alternatively hold down the CTRL key on your keyboard and use the mouse wheel to increase / decrease the text size of this site.

Firefox:

• Click the "View" menu at the top of the browser window.
• Select "Zoom" from the menu.
• Select "Zoom In" or "Zoom Out" to alter the size of the text.

NB: FireFox by default will increase the size of the whole page. If you just want to increase the size of the text, select "Zoom Text Only" and repeat the steps shown above (doing this may cause some layout elements to display incorrectly).

Alternatively hold down the CTRL key on your keyboard and use the mouse wheel to increase / decrease the text size of this site.

Skip Navigation:

Screen readers often have difficulty when reading websites that contain a lot of navigation links, therefore a Skip Navigation link has been built in to our site. The Skip Navigation link will quite literally allow you to jump over all the navigation links. This means if you use screen reader you don't have to listen to a long list of links before getting to the information held on the page.

Disabled Functions:

This site runs using XHTML and CSS. XHTML and CSS is the base code supported by all browsers, however some people may choose to have CSS disabled. Although the site runs using CSS, it will work correctly if CSS is disabled (Please Note: doing this may cause some layout elements to display incorrectly).

Acronyms & Abbreviations:

As part of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, all acronyms and abbreviations must have their full meanings specified. Therefore, tool tips have been used on our site to display the complete meaning of the abbreviation or acronym.

Printer Friendly:

Our site has been built to be printer friendly.

Mobility Difficulties

We already have over 30 branches with level access and regularly review the design and layout of our branches so that access is made as easy as possible.

Deaf and hearing impaired

All our offices have the Hearing loop facility installed and some offer a portable mini loop system which can be used in interview areas for extra privacy.

Blind / Visually Impaired Members

All our literature is available in large print or audio cassette on request. If you would prefer to receive regular communications, for example mortgage or investment interest statements in large print or audio cassette please contact us on 0845 600 4370 for further information.