Accessibility
Help in making our website look the way you want
This website was created has been developed with accessibility in mind. Users with stylesheets enabled are able to change the colours, font size, font family and style of our website to one of two high-contrast themes.
Accessibility features
We offer the following accessibility features on our site:
- Skip to content to help screen readers access content quickly.
- A search facility and sitemap to find content quickly...
- Clear logical navigation....
- CSS to separate style from content so that the same content is available to ALL viewers regardless of how the content is accessed...
- High-contrast alternative stylesheets (viewing themes) designed to assist reading for visitors with poor eyesight...
- Sizable text for comfortable reading...
- Standards compliant, valid, semantic markup to ensure compatability across many browsers, screen readers, alternative media-types and assitance software...
- Alternative CSS Fonts (MS Comic Sans)
We have developed high-contrast themes for users with impaired vision. Users can set their preferred font size and font family using the function at the top of every page.
We use proportional font sizes so that text-sizes can easily be increased or decreased in your browser and wont break the flow of the page.
Accessibility and usability of our site
Our website strives to uphold the principles and best practice of the WCAG 1.0 AAA guidelines. While we aim to comply with the WCAG guidelines, we recognise that web technology has moved on since their creation, and a number of them are less applicable than at their time of publication. Our central objective is users finding our site accessible and usable in practice. Attention to the accessibility of the code, it's validity and useability, plus end-user testing in multiple browsers ensures that this is the case.
Our site's code
The site has been built to comply with standards XHTML and CSS2. At every stage the code has been checked for accessibility using a range of automated and manual checks. In older browsers where CSS is not supported it will appear as an unstyled document. All information and functionality will still be accessible.
Navigation and Quick Links
Navigation is held in ordered lists to be meaningful to speech browsers. Additionally there are hidden links the top of every page which when triggered will skip directly to the main page content or to the navigation list as required. The bottom of every page contains links to the navigation list and to jump tp the top of the page. All these links are visible when the site is viewed without a stylesheet and will be spoken by screen-reading software.
Your Feedback
Ultimately the best testers for accessibility are its users. We welcome feedback on the accessibility and usability of our website. If you have had any problems or any issues while using our site, we would like to hear about it! Email, phone and address details are on our contacts page.
Downloading Files
There are four main types of file that can be viewed or downloaded from this website:
1. PDFs - Portable Document Format (
)
2. Microsoft Word (
)
3. Microsoft Powerpoint (
)
4. Microsoft Excel (
)
Depending upon how your browser and the application (e.g. Adobe, Word, Powerpoint or Excel) are configured, these documents may either open in a viewer within your browser window or in an instance of the stand-alone application outside your browser window; you may be given the option to select whether to open or save the file.
If you have difficulties opening a document by following the link or to save a copy of the document on your computer, "right-click" on the link to the document itself and save it on your computer. Then open the document using the application appropriate for the type of file. On Apple computers, instead of right-clicking, position the cursor over the link and hold down the button until the context menu appears, then select the appropriate option to save the file on your computer.
Portable Document Format
Portable Document Format (PDF) files are viewed using Adobe Acrobat Reader. PDF files provide the easiest way to view and print a document that looks as close to the original document as possible. A free copy of
Acrobat Reader can be downloaded from Adobe's site.
Microsoft Word
Some documents are Microsoft Word (DOC) format. Microsoft Word is a word processor from the Microsoft Office family. A free copy of Microsoft
Word Viewer 2003 can be downloaded from Microsoft's site.
Microsoft PowerPoint
Some documents are in Microsoft PowerPoint format. A free copy of Microsoft
Powerpoint Viewer 2003 can be downloaded from Microsoft's site.
Microsoft Excel
Some documents are in Microsoft Excel format. A free copy of Microsoft
Excel Viewer 2003 can be downloaded from Microsoft's site.