Edinburgh and the Lothians
Samaritans - AccessibilityDiversity and Equality
Samaritans has a diversity and equality policy which is as applicable to staff and volunteers as it is also to those who call us. One major result of our drive for accessibility was our move to the present Torphichen Street premises which gave us the benefit of ground floor access, a lift to other floors and a more easily managed ramp.
Website - Bobby Approval
This website passes both the manual and the automatic tests to comply
with the Section 508 guidelines from the Architectural and
Transportation Barriers Compliance Board (Access Board) of the U.S.
Federal Government. The test, known as Bobby,
is recommended by the UK Cabinet Office in
its own guidelines for web accessibility. There is no authorised
automatic test for the UK guidelines.
We want our website to be accessible to as many people as possible. The ideal for a website is that everyone accesses precisely the same pages, regardless of any difficulty they might have with vision, hearing or motor ability. That's why we have made the entire site comply with accessibility guidelines. We appreciate that there are more stringent guidelines than US 508 in existence and that as yet, not all of the site complies with all guidelines, for example those of the RNIB. We will work to improve the accessibility of the site yet further.
Text only version
We do recognise that there will always be some people, who prefer the simplest and
fastest browsing experience possible. This might provide better
compatibility with older assistive software or it might be better for
them if they have a particularly slow connection speed through using
either mobile technology or having a poor quality exchange line. That is why we
are also committed to providing our information in plain text format.
Plain text pages are updated at the same time as graphical pages and
will always possess the same informational content. All of the content
displayed in the text version can be presented in any font, colour or
size that the viewer's browser permits.