Site help

Features to enhance the site's accessibility

These features have been implemented to help make our site accessible to as many people as possible:

• All text should be resizable using your browser's text-resize option.
• We have used a clear readable font Arial or Sans-serif.
• All content has been written in plain English steering away from jargon wherever possible.
• All images have been given appropriate alternative text.
• The site has been tested to ensure that it is accessible in a range of browsers.
• A printable style sheet has been used on this site which means when you print out a page you only get the main content and not extraneous navigation elements.
• HTML heading elements have been used to represent page structure, supporting assistive technologies that allow page navigation from heading to heading.
• All hyperlinks should make sense when read out of context, and hyperlinks change colour when the destination page has been visited.
• 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).
• A navigation bar linking to the main sections of the site is consistently placed.
• A link to a site map feature is provided on every page to help navigation.
• A logical tab order has been used throughout this site in order to enable ease of navigation using a keyboard or any other input device to browse.
• We have endeavoured to spell out in full every acronym and abbreviation used in this web site. In order to find out what a particular acronym means, simply hover over it with your mouse and the meaning will appear in the form of a 'tool tip'.
• If you come across an acronym or abbreviation used on this site which has not been explained and you like to find out what it means, please get in touch with us and let us know.

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Visual design

This site uses cascading style sheets for visual layout. If your browser or browsing device does not support stylesheets at all, the use of structured semantic markup ensures that the content of each page is still readable and clearly structured. We have used a common accessible design throughout this web site rather than providing text only pages for specific users.

You may use your own styles or stylesheet to format this web site:

• In Internet Explorer select Tools, then Internet Options, and then Accessibility. Next click on any or all 3 checkboxes to ignore colours, font styles or font sizes. In the same window you can change your style sheet by clicking the checkbox that says, 'format document using my style sheet' then simply browse to your style sheet and click OK.
• In Mozilla Firefox select Tools, then Options, and then Content. Select your preferred font and font colour.
• In Netscape select Edit, then Preferences and then Appearance. You will be given the choice to specify your own colours and fonts.

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Standards compliance

• Every effort has been made to make sure that the code used to create this web site successfully validates using the W3C markup validator
• All stylesheets should validate using W3C CSS validator.
• Pages should comply with our interpretation of all relevant priority 1,2 and 3 Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. It should be noted that these are guidelines and are open to interpretation, this is always a judgement call.

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PDFs

Some documents in this web site are in PDF format. The advantage of a PDF is that it will always be presented consistently.

You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader to open PDF files, you may already have Adobe Acrobat Reader on your computer but if not it can be downloaded for free from the Adobe Acrobat website.

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