The British Softball Federation is committed to making its website available to as many people as possible and makes every effort to ensure its communications are accessible to those with special needs, including those with visual, hearing, cognitive and motor impairments. As guidance, this website uses the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) put together by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an international community working together to develop web standards.

The website is coded with validated HTML 5, uses structured semantic markup and the CSS has also been validated.

Changes to improve accessibility are ongoing, but if you come across a page you find difficult to use please let us know.

Accessibility design

This website has been designed to be as accessible as possible and to be compatible with the types of adaptive technology used by people with disabilities, including screen readers. As such, visitors can control the size of the text and can use ‘access keys’ on the keyboard rather than the mouse to navigate through pages such as scrolling up and down, tabbing to focus on links and buttons in sequential order, and using the 'enter' key to activate them. Please note that the availability of keyboard tabbing features might depend on the user's individual browser or device settings.. The stylesheet uses relative font sizes.

We have aimed to use foreground and background colours that contrast well throughout the site, with the majority of page content appearing black on white.

The site rarely uses frames and uses a cascading style sheet (CSS) for visual layout. Tables are occasionally used for tabular data, but we have avoided using them to dictate the layout of a page wherever possible.

Known browser support 

The website stylesheet is written to display pages correctly in most commonly used modern desktop and mobile browsers on Apple Mac and Microsoft Windows operating systems: Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Opera.  

Microsoft Internet Explorer is generally no longer considered a modern browser as its development has been discontinued in favour of Edge and it does not support some major modern website layout techniques that are commonly supported on the other browsers mentioned here. As such, this website's layout will likely not display properly if viewed on Internet Explorer.

Links

In most cases, internal links on the site (between pages on the BSF website) open in the current browser tab/window and external website links on the site (i.e. when the link target is on a non-BSF site) will open in a new browser tab/window. This means that the user can easily still access the BSF site in the original tab. Downloadable documents from the Documents section of the website will either download to your computer or open in a new browser tab/window depending on your browser settings.

Users can choose to open a link in a new tab/window in the following ways on a desktop computer:

  • Right-clicking on the link and selecting 'Open link in new tab' or 'Open link in new window'
  • Holding down the 'Control' key on the keyboard (or 'Command' on a Mac) while left-clicking on a link
  • Clicking on the link by pressing the middle scroll button on their mouse

Some links may have title attributes, which describe the link in greater detail, and in the majority of cases the text of the link should already adequately describe the target. Wherever possible, links are written to make sense out of context.

Images

The intention is that all images used in content and within the design on the site should include descriptive ALT attributes. 

PDFs

Most documents on this website are PDFs (portable document format). The advantage of a PDF is that it will always be presented consistently. You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader to open PDF files, and this can be downloaded for free. Adobe includes its own accessibility tools such as screen reader. If it is necessary for a downloadable document to be in a file format other than PDF, you will need compatible software on your device to open it. This might already exist on your device but please contact us if you require guidance.

Multimedia (Video and Audio)

In most cases where video is published on the site it will be as an embedded video from our YouTube channel which can either be watched within the web page or by following the link to open in the YouTube website or native YouTube mobile app. YouTube videos are suitable for a variety of different connection types and speeds, with some configuration options available. Unfortunately, due to cost and time implications, we cannot routinely provide transcripts of each of the videos.

JavaScript

Where JavaScript is used, it is generally to enhance the user experience and improve accessibility of core site functions. For example, JavaScript is used to make dropdown navigation menus more accessible to those using keyboard tabbing and to aid smoother opening and closing of them, including on mobile devices.