Accessibility & Web Standards
Accessibility Policy
This site has been designed and built to be assessible to the widest possible audience. If you have a problem accessing any of the content please contact us and we will do our best to help.
Access Keys
Most browsers support jumping to specific links by typing keys defined on the web site. On Windows, you can press ALT + an access key; on Macintosh, you can press CTRL + an access key. The following access keys are available throughout the site:
| Access key | Target |
|---|---|
| 1 | Home page |
| 3 | Site Map |
| 4 | Search |
| 9 | Contact |
| 0 | Accessibility policy |
Alternative Navigation
In Mozilla , Safari or Internet Explorer: Press F12 to jump onto the navbar, then move around the menus with the arrow keys. You can activate a link by pressing Enter as normal, or jump back onto the page with F12 again.
In Opera: You can move around the navbar and menus using the A and Q [anchor navigation] keys, or using Spatial Navigation (hold down Shift then use the arrow keys to move around the page in two-dimensions; support for spatial navigation is not perfect, but it's pretty good). You can activate a link by pressing the Enter key as normal.
In Opera 8: You can also navigate the menus using relevant voice commands, such as "previous/next link", "open link", and the "move" commands of spatial navigation.
In Konqueror: You can move around the navbar and menus using the Tab key, and activate a link with the Enter key as normal.
Browser Preferences
Changing browser preferences may help to make this site easier to use. It is possible to change text size and colour as well as background colours by making changes in the preferences or options section of your browser. The exact details of how to do this will be different for each type of browser, however to increase the text size in Internet Explorer select View | Text Size; in (the vastly superior) Mozilla Firefox use the Ctrl and + or - sign on the number pad. Comprehensive advise is available on Lois Wakeman's web site.
Images
All images that convey information have a text equivalent. The exceptions are images that we use for purely decorative purposes.
Use of Tables
Tables are never used for page layout, only for tabular data.
Structured Semantic Markup
All pages on this site use structured semantic markup. H1 elements are used for main titles, H2 and H3 tags for subtitles, LI for list items, BLOCKQUOTES (you guessed it) for quotes e.t.c. All pages (with only a couple of exceptions for technical reasons) are written in XHTML Strict and validate 100% correct with the W3C validation service.
More details on Standards Compliance.
Visual Design
This site uses cascading style sheets for visual layout and presentation. If your browser or browsing device does not support stylesheets at all, the content of each page is still readable.
A special cascading style sheet has been developed so that pages print without unnecessary graphics or other elements such as the menu bar.
Scripts
In some cases the scripts provide additional functionality or a more user friendly interface (e.g. the menu), however all pages are fully functional with browsers which don't support client-side scripting.
WCAG 1.0 Checkpoints
Most pages comply with (or exceed) priority 2 guidelines of the W3 Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. This is a subjective judgement, however after reviewing all the criteria I believe this to be the case. All pages pass automated verification with Cynthia Says.
Links
Many links have title attributes which describe the link in greater detail. Whenever possible, links are written to make sense out of context.
There are no javascript: pseudo-links. All links can be followed in any browser, even if scripting is turned off. External links are shown with a different colour and icon like this, however these will only show up in modern CSS compliant browsers such as Firefox (Win/Mac), Opera (Windows) and Safari (Mac). There are no internal or external links that open new windows.
