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Accessibilty

This site has been built in accordance with best practices for accessibility and web standards

Practical measures include the following:

Access Keys

Access keys are keyboard shortcuts that replace the need to use a mouse for navigation.

To use an access key, hold down the ALT key (on Windows) or the CTRL key (on Macs) and press the appropriate letter. Then press RETURN to go to the desired page.

Access Keys are not case sensitive, so both ALT-S and ALT-s are equally valid keys for "Jump to Content".

For this site, you can use:

S Jump to Content (Skip Navigation) N Jump to Navigation L Jump to Local Navigation 0 Jump to accessibility Statement 1 Jump to Home Page 2 Jump to News 3 Jump to Sitemap 9 Jump to Contact Page

Accessible design

Many Internet users with disabilities find websites difficult or even impossible to use simply because of the way they are designed.

This website has been designed to be as accessible as possible and to be compatible with the types of adaptive technology used by people with disabilities, including screen readers.

As such visitors can control the size of the text and can use 'access keys' on the keyboard rather than the mouse to navigate through the pages.

Resizable fonts

You may change the font size of this document to your preference through your browser. In Internet Explorer, select View, then Text Size, and then your preferred size. In Netscape select View, then Text Zoom, and then your preferred percentage size.

Internal navigation links

At the start of every page are invisible links providing direct access to content, navigation and the accessibility statement, each with access keys. When keyboard-navigating, however, the links become visible - you can view these links by using the tab key on each page.

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 (such as the headline of an article).
  2. 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.
  3. Link text is never duplicated; two links with the same link text always point to the same address.
  4. There are no javascript pseudo-links. All links can be followed in any browser, even if scripting is turned off.
  5. There are no links that open new windows without warning.

Images

  1. All content images used in the site include descriptive ALT attributes. Purely decorative graphics include null ALT attributes.
  2. Multimedia elements (Flash) include LONGDESC attributes and links to text-only descriptions to explain each image to non-visual readers.

Visual design

This site uses cascading style sheets for visual layout.

  1. Internet Explorer has a limited text resizing feature ("View" menu, "Text Size") and this site has been designed to use relative font sizes to aid this.
  2. If your browser or browsing device does not support stylesheets at all, the content of each page is still readable.

Accessibility references

  1. W3 accessibility guidelines , which explains the reasons behind each guideline.
  2. W3 accessibility techniques , which explains how to implement each guideline.
  3. W3 accessibility checklist , a busy developer's guide to accessibility.

Accessibility software and services

  1. Bobby , a free service to analyze web pages for compliance to accessibility guidelines.
  2. HTML Validator , a free service for checking that web pages conform to published HTML standards.
  3. Web Page Backward Compatibility Viewer , a tool for viewing your web pages without a variety of modern browser features.
  4. JaWS , a screen reader for Windows. a time-limited demo is available.
  5. Lynx , a free text-only web browser.