Accessibility

We are committed to making our website as accessible as possible with a view to achieving W3C AA compliance. This is an ongoing process and we are continually reviewing the site and making improvements to its accessibility.

Standards compliance

All pages on this site follow the priority 1 & 2 guidelines for the W3C Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0.

All pages on this site use structured semantic markup and vaidate to CSS level 2.1 and XHTML 1.0 Transitional.

Structural Markup

When CSS (Cascading Styles Sheet) are not applied to a document (or when using a screen reader), the website reads in the following order.

A header bar that includes the main navigation
A main content area
A footer

Unless they are purely decorative items, all images used on this web site have suitable alt attributes that describe the image. Content is intended be usable/accessible with images "off" (i.e with images disabled).

Links

Many links have title attributes which describe the link in greater detail, unless the text of the link fully describes the target. Links are written to make sense out of context. Menu links are assumed to be sufficiently clear and not require title text. URLs are permanent whenever possible.

Pop up Windows

This site does not use pop-up windows. Where a link opens a new window, this behavior is indicated by "(opens in new window)". Where a link opens a PDF or other document type, it will be noted that the page will open if possible.

Visual design

This site uses cascading style sheets for visual layout. This site 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, the content of each page is still readable. Any information conveyed through the use of color is also available without color (i.e. text based).

Target Browsers

This site has been optimized for the most popular browsers:

Internet Explorer Version 7.0 and above
Firefox Version 2.0