Accessibility Statement

Heritage Building Society is committed to ensuring that this website is accessible to everyone. If you have any questions or suggestions regarding the accessibility of this site, please contact us.

Various elements of this website have been optimised for accessibility; you can take advantage of these in a number of ways according to your preferences.

Accessibility Features - how to use

Navigating between headings

If you are using a recent version of a screen reader you should be able to navigate via the headings in the page structure by:

• H to cycle forwards through the headings
• Shift + H to cycle backwards through the headings
• 1 to navigate to the next level 1 heading (or a number between 1 and 6 to navigate to the next heading on this level)
• Shift + 1 to navigate to the previous level 1 heading (or a number between 1 and 6 to navigate to the previous heading on this level)
• INSERT + F6 to provide a list of all headings

If you are using the Opera Web browser you can also:

• S to cycle forwards through the headings
• W to cycle backwards through the headings

Customising your font size

If you are visually impaired or just prefer to view a larger font size when reading information on the web you can do this by:

• For Internet Explorer users you can change your font size by going to the view > Text Size > and then select your size.
• If you are using Internet Explorer 7 then this menu may be hidden, in which case you can hold down the alt key and press the v key, you should then see the text size menu item.
• Also if you are using Internet Explorer 7 or the Opera Web Browser you can use the zoom functionality to increase the size of all elements on the screen. Locate the Zoom icon in your toolbar or bottom status bar to change the zoom level.

Page Structure

Page order

The main sections and sub-sections of a page are listed below in their relative order. You can use this to determine your locality and orientation within a page.

1. Access Menu
2. Header
3. Online Services Panel
4. Menu (Primary Navigation)
5. Section Menu (Secondary Navigation)
6. Page Content
7. Promotions
8. Footer/Site Information

The sections above are labeled as headings within the page to further assist in the content navigation. If you prefer to navigate the page via the headings, are accessing the site using a small screen device or through a text-based browser, then this should be beneficial.

Layout Variations

There are three main types of layouts and as such, structures used throughout the corporate site. The structure mentioned above was for the default backpages for the site, which form the majority of pages.

For pages that do not require a secondary navigation it has been excluded in the structure because of this. The homepage structure is essentially the same as the default pages except for the elements within the page content area and also the absence of the primary navigation (as this is listed out statically in the page content).

Screen Resolution

The Heritage Building Society website has been primarily designed for users with a screen resolution of 1024 x 768. If however the screen resolution for a user of the site is smaller than this (for example 800 x 600) the layout will switch to a visually narrower width, mainly to avoid horizontal scrolling and to improve the usability of the site.

This behaviour requires javascript to be enabled, if javascript is disabled for your browser then this functionality will not work.

Web Standards Compliancy

Throughout the development of this site various elements produced have been validated against their appropriate web standard. Based on these results modifications were made to reduce accessibility barriers that were identified.

As these elements have now been integrated into a dynamic system that generates and manages the Heritage Corporate site, some elements may not validate to all standards due to implementation constraints. The Standards that the validation testing were based off and what the website producers developed against include:

• Web Content and Accessibility Guidelines 1.0
• HTML 4.01, Strict Document Type
• Cascading Style Sheets, level 2 revision 1
• ECMAScripting standard (Javascript)
• Document Object Model

PDFs and External Links

A consistent format for publishers of the Heritage Building Society website has been implemented for linking PDF documents. This format includes specifying within the link text the initials "PDF" and the file size of the document. This link should also open in a new window.

PDF files available on this website have a file extension of ".ashx". If you receive an error message when opening the PDF documents on this website, it is possible that the version of your PDF reader software may simply need updating. To access the PDF, you can either save the document to disk first with the ".pdf" extension (by right-clicking and selecting "Save Target As") and then opening the saved document with your current reader, or update your version of Adobe Acrobat Reader to the latest version, which will allow the document to be opened.

Links to external sites outside of the Heritage Corporate website should also open in a new window. These elements will also have the title "Opens in a new window" (not within the link text) to give notification that the browser will be opening a new window. If you use a browser that supports tabs then you will still have the control of opening this link in a new tab via your normal open in new tab controls.