accessibility

Site accessibility features

This site employs many features to make information more accessible:

All images have text alternates (ALT attributes).
Pages are organised to be fully functional, even with JavaScript and Flash turned off.
All text uses relative font sizes so text can be enlarged or reduced using the text size options available in visual browsers.
The site can be navigated without the use of a mouse using the Tab key.
Page formatting is achieved with CSS to ensure that the semantic structure of the information is preserved.
This site follows World Wide Web Consortium recommendations and accessibility guidelines.

Standards-compliant design

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), along with other groups and standards bodies, has established technologies for creating and interpreting web-based content. These technologies, which are called “web standards”, are carefully designed to deliver the greatest benefits to the greatest number of web users while ensuring the long-term viability of any document published on the web.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and xHTML

CSS is a simple but powerful mechanism for defining the style and presentation (fonts, colours, margins and borders) of web documents. xHTML combines the power and versatility of XML (Extensible Markup Language) with the familiar web language of HTML. xHTML is the next version of HTML and is designed to allow for richer web pages capable of displaying on a widening range of browser platforms, including mobile phones, PDAs and televisions.

Site Map

A simple site map is available here.

Browsers

You will be able to best experience this site and take full advantage of its features by using a standards-compliant browser. The following browsers support numerous web standards including CSS, xHTML and the DOM (a universal means of controlling the behaviour of web pages):

JavaScript

This site may use JavaScript to improve site design, aid user–interaction and validate forms. The use of JavaScript has been carefully considered and implemented so that it does not negatively impact site accessibility. In particular, we have worked to:

ensure the JavaScript is directly accessible;
provide an accessible, non-JavaScript alternative when JavaScript cannot be made natively accessible;
use device-independent event handlers;
ensure that normal browser functionality is not modified in a way that may cause confusion or inaccessibility.

Site navigation

A consistent navigation structure has been provided on all pages of this site. The navigation bar may be used as an indication of which section of the site you are currently viewing. The selected link is clearly highlighted in the navigation bar.

Links are displayed clearly and in context. The ‘title’ tag is used to provide additional information about links where necessary. This additional information may be viewed in some browsers when your mouse hovers over the link. Some screenreaders may also take advantage of this information.

Use of text

Most navigation elements are plain text and we have provided text alternatives to graphics on the site.

Users who wish to increase the size of the text on screen may do so under the ‘View’ selection on the browser’s main menu, you should find an option called ‘Text Zoom’, ‘Text Magnification’, ‘Text Size’ or ‘Font Size’. From that point it should be relatively simple to find and select an additional sub menu option that adjusts text size to your needs.

Colour

The site has been designed using colours that should provide enough contrast for users who suffer from colour blindness.

Images

This site’s interface makes carefully considered use of images and where images do appear, they include text alternates to enhance accessibility.

Links

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 the headline of an article or name of a person). Links are written to make sense out of context.

References

Accessibility software

JAWS, a screen reader for Windows.
Home Page Reader, a screen reader for Windows.
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.