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Quick facts on worldwide disability

  • 13% (962 million people) worldwide, 1 in 8 people are aged 60+ years old.
  • 10% (528 million people) worldwide, 1 in 10 people show some signs of dyslexia.
  • 3% (253 million people) worldwide, 1 in 33 people have a vision impairment.
  • 25% of people, 1 in 4 adults in the U.S.A. and European Union have arthritis.
  • 15% of people aged 15+ worldwide are illiterate.
  • 25% (12 million adults), 1 in 4 people in the U.K., cannot complete basic online tasks.

For more information on these issues read Information on different categories of people for graphic communication, website and information designers including free reusable infographic. There is also a freely reusable infographic summarising all the statistics, that you can use copyright free, to share on social media or use on website accessibility statements.

How to zoom-in to text and graphics on this website

Overall graphic communication design

We aimed to make the overall graphic communication design of this website accessible and usable, that builds on best practice guidelines and research. We have also structured this website and the navigation bar, into clear parts.

For people with dyslexia

This website’s dyslexia-friendly design features:

  • Simple design and layout (decreased clutter).
  • Avoided underlines on hyperlinks.
  • Slightly larger body text typeface size than normal.
  • Specially designed dyslexia typefaces (Sylexiad Serif and Sylexiad Sans) based on testing with people and Robert’s PhD A typeface for the adult dyslexic reader.
  • Medium length text line width (68 characters with word spaces included).
  • Ranged-left justification (no hyphenation).
  • Half a body text leading between paragraphs.

Language translation

If you cannot read this website because the text is not written in a language you understand, we recommend using Google Translate.

Website accessibility

Our webpages pass many of the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 requirements at levels A, AA and AAA. We also used the WAVE Web Accessibility Tool. This website has also been tested using the ChromeVox screenreader software and the VoiceOver accessibility option on a Mac.

Other accessibility features of this website include:

  • Logical and consistent coding and sectioning for webpage code and design.
  • Logical and consistent navigation for keyboard users.
  • A skip navigation link for screenreader and keyboard users.
  • We also mainly adhere to the A11Y Project checklist (in February 2022), except for the issue of (use only one h1 element per page).
  • Relevant and descriptive alt tags for images.
  • HTML landmark elements.
  • Zoomable.

PDFs [Problem Document Files]

We self-host quite a lot of PDF files, and we are aware they are not very accessible. Instead we have tried to make images available of the PDF pages, and although they are still not ideal for screenreaders, we have tried to describe the content within images relevantly and descriptively using alt tags, which should help a lot more.

Desktop browser compatibility

This website has been cross-platform and cross-browser tested on Windows and Mac operating systems and currently works fine in the following internet browsers:

  • Firefox, version 94.
  • Chrome, version 98.
  • Safari, version 15.

Please note: you may experience issues with older versions of these website browsers. Best advice is to use the most up-to-date internet browser (Firefox or Chrome) for Windows or Mac.

Mobile browser compatibility

This website has been tested on and currently works fine using the smartphone below:

  • Alcatel, Android Oreo (Go edition), Firefox 68 and Chrome 90.

Please note: you may experience issues with older versions of mobile website browsers. Best advice is to use the most up-to-date internet browser (Firefox or Chrome) for your mobile device.

Updates

  • For the 2nd level webpages with the Download typefaces section, we have added an arrow and a selected sub-section heading in the navigation menu, making it more obvious to users that they are in a 2nd level section and webpage. This helps especially if they visit the webpage direct from a search engine.

Accessibility statement date

March 2023 (previous updates: February 2022).