Accessibility

This website has been built with the intention of making the content accessible to the widest range of visitors, regardless of disability or impairment. This has been achieved by adhering to best practices, such as compliance with W3C standards, and ensuring our website honours the accessibility options you have configured on your PC and within your web browser.

Access Keys

Some browsers support jumping to specific links by typing keys defined on the web site.

On Windows, with Internet Explorer, you can press the 'alt' key and the access key together, followed by the 'enter' key;

On Firefox, Netscape and Mozilla you can press 'alt' + 'shift' and the access key together;

On Safari and Google Chrome you can press 'alt' and the access key together;

with Opera you press 'shift', 'escape' and the access key together.

It is the same on Macintosh, except you press the 'ctrl' key instead of the 'alt' key.

Please note: access keys are only supported in Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 and above and Netscape 6.x versions.

The pages on this website adhere to the recommended UK Government access keys standard:

S - Skip navigation
1 - Home page
2 - What's new (the main News page on this website)
3 - Site map
4 - Search (Gives focus to the Search Box)
5 - Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) ('About Us section on this website)
6 - Contact Us
7 - Complaints procedure - (Not Used on this website)
8 - Terms and conditions - (Not Used on this website)
9 - Feedback form
0 - Access key details

Standards compliance

The pages on this website were built to comply with a minimum standard of WCAG AA, complying with all priority 1 and 2 guidelines of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. The pages on this site were tested using Bobby software, and comply with the guidelines on which Bobby is based. Where test results from Bobby have indicated either a warning or a failure to comply with standards these issues have been addressed, and decisions made individually.

All pages on this site validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional.

All pages on this site use structured semantic markup. H1 tags are used for main titles, H2, H3 and H4 tags for subtitles.

Navigation aids

All pages contain a link to the home page, and the menu system has been constructed in a consistent fashion throughout the website. The additional breadcrumb navigation system and selective quick links boxes are designed to reinforce awareness of the location of the page that is being viewed within the website, and to increase overall access to all of the information that is available.

All pages on the website include a search box (access key 4).

Links

Many links have title attributes, which describe the link in greater detail. Links are written to make sense out of context.

Images

All content images used in this site include descriptive ALT attributes. Purely decorative graphics include null ALT attributes. Complex images include LONGDESC attributes or inline descriptions to explain the significance of each image to non-visual readers.
Visual design

This site uses cascading style sheets for visual layout.

If your browser or browsing device does not support stylesheets at all, the content of each page is still readable.

Fonts

This site uses only relative font sizes, compatible with the user-specified "text size" option in visual browsers.

The most common visual browser is Microsoft Internet Explorer and we have provided the following description of how to change your font size display in MSIE version 6:

1. Select 'View' from the top pull down menu options.
2. Select 'Font Size' from the View menu options.
3. Select the font size that you prefer from the list of five available options.
4. Many website visitors with impaired vision need to increase the font size from the default 'Medium' setting to 'Larger' or 'Largest'. You should be aware that although the website has been built to accommodate changed font sizes, that this is not the case with all websites.
5. Some visually impaired web users need to take further steps to make websites visible. Internet Explorer and many other browsers enable you to specify your own Cascading Style Sheet that will override the styling of the websites that you view.

This will give you full control of the visual appearance of the text in websites. You can find out more about specifying your own CSS file by using the Help function within your web browser software.

To change the default text size in Firefox follow these instructions:

1. Select 'View' from the top pull down menu options.
2. Select 'Zoom' from the view menu options.
3. Select either 'Zoom In' to make the text larger or 'Zoom Out' to make the text smaller.