Accessibility Policy
Our goal is to provide a universally easy and simple user experience for all visitors, including people with disabilities that impact their interaction on the web - such as vision loss, hearing loss, limited manual dexterity, and cognitive disabilities.
This page lists some of the accessibility features we have put in place to make our website easy to navigate for as many visitors as possible - regardless of browser, screen resolution or method of accessing the site.
Accessibility features:
- Standards Compliance
- Browser & Reader Compability
- Presentation
- Navigation
- Resizable text
- Images
- Links
Standards Compliance
Our site has been built with focus on a clean, simple interface and universal design principles, using valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional, and conforms to W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) priority 1 and 2 checkpoints. The use of standard XHTML and CSS 2.0 code means that future versions of browsers will also display them correctly.
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Browser & Reader Compability
The pages display correctly with currently available Internet browsers such as Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Safari on both Windows and Macintosh platforms. The site has been tested across different browsers, operating systems and screen resolutions, and also a range of assistive technologies, such as text browsers (eg. Lynx), screen readers, speech synthesis (speech output), alternative keyboards or switches, Braille, screen magnifiers, sound notification, speech recognition, voice browsers. Note that whilst the content is accessible across all technologies, the visual design may be more limited on older systems.
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Presentation
Content and presentation have been separated to optimise accessibility and ensure the website is still usable by people who do not have CSS or javascript enabled.
- Layout is controlled by CSS 2.0 and has been written according to the CSS specifications. The site is still navigable for users who do not use CSS or graphical browsers.
- Properly structured semantic HTML mark-up has been used to assist people with vision impairment and other print disability when accessing the site with audio, speech, braille or text readers.
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Resizable text
We have included a handy text re-sizer in the top right corner of each page. However, if you wish to use your computer's resizing functions instead, do one of the following, according to your browser type:
- Microsoft Internet Explorer:
go to the View menu, select Text Size and then either Larger or Largest. - Mozilla/Firefox:
go to the View menu, Text Size and choose Increase until the text is the size you require. You can also use Ctrl + + and to return to the default size, use Ctrl + 0. - Netscape Navigator:
go to the View menu and choose Increase Font. - Opera:
go to the View menu and choose Zoom and choose a text size. If you have the View toolbar visible (which can be accessed by clicking on the glasses symbol at the right of your address bar), you can also select your zoom size from there. - Safari:
go to the View menu and choose Make Text Bigger. - Camino:
go to the View menu and choose Bigger Text until the text is the size you require.
Note: For those who have a scroll wheel with their mouse, holding down the Ctrl key and scrolling the wheel up or down will increase/decrease text size in all browsers.
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Site Navigation
The site navigation is located to the left of the content in the visual layout, and below the main header when read linearly. There is also a navigation menu in the footer at the bottom of the page.
- We have provided a visible 'skip to content' link and a 'skip to navigation' link at the beginning of each page, for users using text-onlybrowsers such as lynx or screenreaders, which allows you to skip directly to the content (or navigation).
- Links to the page you are on will not be displayed in the navigation choices.
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Images
All content images used in this site include descriptive ALT attributes. Purely decorative graphics will include null ALT attributes.
Complex images will include LONGDESC attributes or inline descriptions to explain the significance of each image to non-visual readers.
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Links
Links are written to make sense out of context. Many links have title attributes which describe the link in greater detail, unless the text of the link already fully describes the target(such as a headline).
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