Home Page : Accessibility

Website Accessibility
Your Website, Your Way

The Sussex Police website has been developed with you in mind. We have made every effort to make it accessible to all our visitors - regardless of browser, platform or Internet connection speed.

Need help with making the web easier to use?

Our main accessibility device is the Talklets toolbar, which automatically appears at the bottom of each page on the website.

What does the Talklets toolbar do?

If the Talklets Toolbar is switched on you can:

Make this website talk

Talklets uses advanced text-to-speech reading technology to read web text in a clear, life-like voice.

• Simply point the cursor at any word, sentence or paragraph and the text will be read back to you.
• Alternatively, clicking the button with the speaker icon reads the main text block on the page. This control is particularly useful on feature pages rather than home pages, where content is often broken up in to small elements and links.
• To stop text being read at any point simply click on the ‘x’ button.
• If you’d like to save the speech as a file for later listening or moving on to a mobile device such as an iPod, clicking the ‘mp3’ button will save the main text block on the page. You can also highlight any text area and save just that. Talklets automatically suggests a file name for the MP3 file, but you can adjust this to any name you wish by over-writing it. Similarly, you can adjust the location in which the file is saved.

Navigate the website without use of a mouse

The toolbar uses a ‘hot keys’ system, which allows it to be controlled by the use of keyboard strokes rather a mouse. The standard keys are as follows:

• F9 Switch hot keys and sound on/off.
• F12 Listen to Hot Key list.
• S Smart Story Finder – This feature automatically finds the main news story or content on the page (currently only available for Internet Explorer users).
• M Toggle the mouse over reader. When on, the text of the element the mouse is over will be read.
• A Go to next link.
• H Go to next heading.
• L Go to next list.
• I Go to next item in a list.
• G Go to Google Accessible Search.
• E Go to the next editable input box. Please note, this means your key presses will enter text and NOT activate hotkeys. To activate hot key interaction again press F8.
• B Next button.
• F8 Step out of input element, so access keys are re-enabled.
• T Next table.
• X Next section of text.
• SHIFT Pressing SHIFT at the same time as any of the above (except the Smart Story Finder) reads the previous.
• U Enter a web address (URL).
• Backspace Go to previous page.
• Full stop and SHIFT Go to next element. Most element types will be read aloud.
• Comma and SHIFT Go to previous element. Most element types will be read aloud.
• Z Zoom in.
• Z and SHIFT Zoom out.
• V Read again.

Increase or decrease the size of text

Simply click on the ‘+’ button to make text on the page bigger or ‘-‘ to make it smaller.

Adjust the background colour

Simply click on the ‘Highlight’ button and choose your preferred colour in order to change the colour of the background behind the text. Selecting ‘Default’ from the list restores the highlighter to the default light grey colour used by Talklets.

Using this function in conjunction with the zoom control makes reading the website far easier for web users with colour blindness, visual stress or any other form of visual difficulty.

Look up words in a dictionary or thesaurus

To look up a word, simply right-click when you’re next to it. A box will then appear giving you the option to look up the word in either an online dictionary or thesaurus.

For further information on how to use the Talklets toolbar simply click on 'Help' (on the right-hand side of the toolbar).

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