This site has been designed to follow current World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recognised accessibility standards and guidelines, where possible. It should be accessible in any standards compliant web browser or user agent. This page details the methods taken to try to ensure accessibility to this site.
This site has a Site Map Page with an Index of all Contents for ease of reference.
This site uses relative (not absolute) sizes for fonts and text. The text on this site can thus be re-sized for improved reading. Most browsers allow you to re-size the text by selecting the View Menu, then the Text Size sub-menu.
Many browsers (including FireFox, Opera, and Netscape) also let you increase or decrease the text size with the CTRL and + or CTRL and - key combinations (hold the Control key whilst pressing either plus or minus keys).
On all pages the following Access Keys (or keyboard shortcuts) are available :-
Access key 1 - Goes to the Home page
Access key 2 - Skips over the navigation bar to the main Page content
Access key 3 - Goes to the Site Map page quick index to ALL contents
Access key 9 - Contact Us - a link to the page details Contact Telephone Numbers
Note : to use Access Keys, on Windows you can press ALT + an access key then press the ENTER key; for example, ALT + 1 then ENTER for the Home Page. On a Macintosh, you can press Control + an access key.
Please note that Access keys are not supported on some older browsers (for instance Netscape 6 and earlier).
HTML and CSS compliance are checked against the W3C's on-line automated validators, for interoperability across browsers and platforms. Pages have been checked for accessibility against the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) at Level Double-A conformance.
Care
has been taken to create interoperable, standards compliant
Web pages, that validate in accordance with the W3C automated Markup
Validation Service.
This page complies with all of the automatic checkpoints of the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0 at Level Double-A Conformance (Priority 1 and Priority 2 checkpoints), as tested and verified by the Watchfire WebXACT service.
This site uses properly formatted and structured code that adheres to current Web Standards. All pages are written in XHTML and use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for visual layout, as recommended by the W3C. Each page uses well-structured semantic markup, for example using header tags like <h1>, <h2>, and <p> paragraph tags to logically structure the content. The use of spacer images (GIF’s) for page layout is avoided, as are deprecated tags such as FONT, overuse of line break <BR> tags, etc.
If your browsing device doesn’t support stylesheets, or if you have them turned off, the site content should still be accessible, readable and understandable.
Information is presented such that the linearised reading order should be the same as the literal (visual) reading order. User of screen readers such as JAWS and text based browsers such as LYNX should therefore be able to access, read and understand the content of this site.
Accessibility compliance depends on automated tests as well as a number of other considerations and checkpoints that rely on a subjective human interpretation (for example the use of colours and order of presentation).
Any suggestions, comments and feedback to improve accessibility are always appreciated. If you experience any difficulties accessing the information on our website, please contact us and we will pass your comments on to our site designer.
