Accessibility statement

Introduction

Every effort has been made to make this website as accessible to as wide a range of people as possible. We are committed to ongoing accessibility improvements. If you are having difficulty accessing this website for any reason or would like to give us some feedback, please contact us.

Our guidelines include that we:

• provide BrowseAloud to read aloud our web content if needed
• use meaningful ALT text for all images to provide descriptive text (excluding decorative images)
• use descriptive hyperlink text where necessary
• provide accessible navigation
• use an easy-to-see web colour scheme
• use an easy to read font type, size and colour.
   

Text resizing

This can be activated using browser preferences:

PC - Internet Explorer 6 From the top menu bar, select View and point to Text size
PC - Internet Explorer 7 From the menu bar underneath the search field, select Page and point to Text size
PC - other browsers Increase text size: Hold down the CTRL key and press + Decrease text size: Hold down the CTRL key and press -
Mac - all browsers Increase text size: Hold down the Command key and press + Decrease text size: Hold down the Command key and press -

Access keys

Most browsers support jumping to specific links by typing keys defined on the website. On Windows, you can press ALT + an access key (you may have to then press return). On Macintosh, you can press Control + an access key. All pages on this site have the access key: Access key 2 - Skip Navigation.

Navigation aids

All pages have home and search links to aid navigation in text-only browsers. Netscape 6 and Mozilla users can also take advantage of this feature by selecting the View menu, Show/Hide, Site Navigation Bar, Show Only As Needed (or Show Always). Screen reader software like JAWS (see Accessibility Software below) can access the search easily and also skip past the navigation bar directly to the content. This is by selecting the links which read out first on the page.

Images

All content images used in this site include descriptive ALT attributes in most cases. Purely decorative graphics include null ALT attributes.

Visual design

This site uses cascading style sheets for styling. It uses only relative font sizes, compatible with the user-specified "text size" option in visual browsers. If your browser or browsing device does not support style sheets at all, the content of each page is still readable.

Accessibility software

• JAWS - a screen reader for Windows. A time-limited, downloadable demo is available.
• Home Page Reader - a screen reader for Windows. A downloadable demo is available.
• Lynx - a free text-only web browser for blind users with refreshable Braille displays.
• Links - a free text-only web browser for visual users with low bandwidth.
• Opera –  a visual browser with many accessibility-related features, including text zooming, user style sheets, image toggle. A free downloadable version is available. Compatible with Windows, Macintosh, www, and several other operating systems.

Accessibility testers

The site has been tested using manual and automatic testers. Dreamweaver and Cynthia Says were used in the testing against Report Mode Section 508 and also WCAG priority 1.