This section of the website contains information on the accessibility of our web, print and telephone services.

We are committed to making all our methods of communication as accessible to as many people as possible. 

About the 'accessibility strip' at the top of the website

The 'accessibility strip' at the very top of each page on the NAS website enables you to:

  • Change the background colour
    This feature is designed primarily for people with dyslexia. The colourways were recommended and provided by Nomensa, an organisation internationally recognised for its web accessibility expertise.
  • Enlarge the font
    If you feel this does not cater to your needs, the Firefox browser offers excellent text size enhancement options.
  • Have the website read out to you
    Our website is Browsealoud-enabled so that you can listen to the content if you download the free software - especially useful on some of our longer information sheets. Not only is this useful if you have a visual impairment but you can carry on listening while you do something else.


If you are visually impaired and have experienced difficulties with using or navigating our site, do please contact the Web Editor: we need your feedback to understand any difficulties our users might be experiencing, and to improve our website.

'Easy read' information

We have 'easy read' versions of some of our most popular information. It is useful for people whose first language is not English, who may have a learning difficulty, or who would like simplified information to use. 

Advice and support in other languages and scripts

Advice and support material available in community languages and scripts.

W3C's WAI accessibility guidelines

The site has been designed to comply wherever possible with Level AA and even AAA conformance of the W3C's WAI accessibility guidelines and in accordance with RNIB recommendations. 

Level Double-A conformance icon, �D;�A; W3C-WAI Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0

The following caveat for the above badging comes from the W3C WAI website [our emboldening of text]:

Please note that use of this logo is not conditional on an automated test. There is as yet no tool that can perform a completely automatic assessment on the checkpoints in the guidelines, and fully automatic testing may remain difficult or impossible. For instance, some checkpoints rely on an interpretation of what "important" information is, or whether the text equivalent for a non-text element is accurate.

It is also possible for automated accessibility checkers to register "false negatives" or "false positives" due to the type of mark-up on a page. For these reasons, the logos...are used to indicate only a claim of conformance made by the author of a page, not a machine-validated conformance.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSSs) are used to retain uniformity across the site.