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Accessibility

Functionality and accessibility are core to our online best practice, we programme for the widest audience meeting DDA and W3C standards to priority 1 and 2 rating and priority 3 where possible. All sites are tested on both PC and MAC platforms using an "Elegant Degradation" methodology - additional best practice standards below:

  • Platforms: PC Windows (XP) Apple Mac (OSX)
  • Resolution: 1024x768 viewable
  • Browsers Tested: PCIE 6 & 7, Firefox 2 & 3 / MAC – Safari 3
  • Fonts: Scaleable
  • Cascading Style Sheets (CSS): Pages viewable without images (i.e. Lynx browsers). A separate print style is included
  • Images: Wherever information is presented using images, matching alternative text is provided
  • Flash: Player 8 / Detection with automatic alternative content replacement
  • JavaScript: Detection with automatic alternative non-JavaScript content replacement
  • Access Keys: We make web pages more accessible to people with motoric disabilities
  • Code validation: XHTML 1.0 Transitional - with http://validator.w3.org [ new window ]

Access keys

Most browsers support jumping to specific links by typing keys defined on the web site. On Windows, you can press ALT + an access key + ENTER; on Macintosh, you can press Control + an access key. All pages on this site define the following access keys:

  • Access key 1 – Home page
  • Access key s – Skip to content
  • Access key 0 – Accessibility statement
  • Access key 3 – Sitemap
  • Access key 8 – Privacy statement

Navigation aids

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). Links are written to make sense out of context.

Images

All content images used in this site include descriptive ALT attributes. Purely decorative graphics include null ALT attributes. Complex images have a text link to a longer description.

Visual aids

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