Accessibility

Our website has been designed to meet a wide range of user needs.

Browser compatibility

This site has been developed to work with all browsers on all platforms and be accessible to and usable to all visitors.

Access keys

Access keys are keyboard shortcuts that replace the need to use the mouse for navigation, in browsers that support them. In Internet Explorer on Windows, you can press ALT + and the relevant access key; on Macintosh, you can press Control + and the relevant access key. Then press Enter to activate the link.

The following access keys are available throughout the website:

1 Jump to Homepage

S (Skip navigation) Jump to main content

N Jump to Navigation menu

9 Jump to Contact Us

0 Jump to Accessibility Statement (this page)

M Jump to Site Map

These access keys have been chosen to follow the UK government e-envoy’s guidelines where applicable, in order to support the adoption of a useful standard.

Images

All content images used in this site include descriptive alt attributes.

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 stylesheets at all, the content of each page is still readable. On no page is it essential to see text colour correctly, and effort has been taken to maintain high background-foreground contrast at all times.

Forms

All forms follow a logical Tab sequence. Labels are associated with fields using HTML label tags.

Scripting

This site makes heavy use of scripting for visual effects. However, all content remains fully accessible if scripting is unavailable.

Links

1. Many links have title attributes which describe the link in greater detail, unless the text of the link already fully describes the target.
2. There are no "javascript:" pseudo-links. All links can be followed in any browser, even if scripting is turned off.
3. There are no links that open new windows.
4. Wherever possible, links are written to make sense out of context. Many browsers (such as JAWS, Home Page Reader, Lynx, and Opera) can extract the list of links on a page and allow the user to browse the list, separately from the page.

Standards compliance

1. Where possible all pages are intended to comply with all priority 1, 2, and 3 guidelines of the W3 Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
2. All pages validate as xhtml 1.1
3. All pages use structured semantic markup. To report accessibility problems If you come across any access barriers with our site, please let us know and we will do our best to fix them.

You can e-mail us at our contact page.