Accessible Web Design

This website is designed to be accessible to as many users as possible, and to meet or exceed current UK accessibility legislation and internationally accepted guidelines.

If you have any questions or comments regarding accessibility, please feel free to contact us.

      

accessibility features on this website

Standards Compliance

• Pages on this aim to conform to the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines to at least priority 2 level.
• Pages on this site aim to conform to both the spirit and the letter of the United Kingdom Disability Discrimination Act 1995.
• All pages on this site adhere to current web-standards, and validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional.
• This site uses validated CSS for all visual layout.
• All pages on this site use structured semantic markup, meaning that if your browser or browsing device does not support CSS, the content of each page should still be readable.

Links
Linking text have been written to make sense out of context, and, wherever possible, title attributes which describe the link in greater detail have been added.

Images
All content images used in this site include descriptive ALT attributes. Purely decorative graphics are either applied using CSS, or include null ALT attributes.

Images used for headings are applied using CSS – since the heading exists as text behind the graphic, ALT attributes are unnecessary.

Font Sizes
You may change the font size of this document via the preference-settings of your browser.

Additionally, all modern browsers (with the exeption of Internet Explorer for Windows) allow resizing of text via the keyboard using CTRL (apple-control for Macintosh) and the '+' or '-' keys.

Colours
This site's font and background colour combinations have been checked against the different colour blindness conditions and ensured that all information is still clear.

Tables
Where tables are used, they contain tabular data only, and are not used for layout.

Accessibility References & Software

• W3 accessibility guidelines, which explains the reasons behind each guideline.
• W3 accessibility techniques, which explains how to implement each guideline.
• The Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (DDA)
• JAWS, a screen reader for Windows.
• Home Page Reader, IBM's screen reader for Windows.
• Lynx, a free text-only web browser for blind users with refreshable Braille displays.
• Firefox, a standards-compliant, secure visual web-browser with many user-configurable accessibility-related features, including: text zooming; user stylesheets; image toggling. A free download is available for Windows, Macintosh, Linux and other operating systems.