Accessibility

Functionality and accessibility are core to our online best practice, we programme for the widest audience meeting DDA and W3C standards to priority 1 and 2 rating and priority 3 where possible. All sites are tested on both PC and MAC platforms with using an “Elegant Degradation” methodology - additional best practice standards below:

Platforms: PC Windows (98, NT ,2K, XP) Apple Mac (OS9, OSX)
Resolution: Optimised for 1024 x 768
Browsers Tested: PC- IE5,IE5.5,IE6,Firefox1 / MAC – Safari
Fonts: Scaleable
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS): Pages viewable without images (i.e. Lynx browsers)
Images: Wherever information is presented using images, matching alternative text is provided and printed using a seperate print CSS file.
Flash: Detection with automatic alternative content replacement
JavaScript: Detection with automatic alternative non-JavaScript content replacement
Access Keys: We make web pages more accessible to people with motoric disabilities
Code validation: XHTML 1.0 Strict – with http://validator.w3.org

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 + ENTER; on Macintosh, you can press Control + an access key. All pages on this site define the following access keys:

Access key 1 – Home page
Access key s – Content
Access key n – Navigation
Access key m – Sitemap
Access key 0 – Accessibility statement

Links

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). 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 aids

This site uses cascading style sheets for visual layout. This site uses relative font sizes, compatible with the user-specified “text size” option in visual browsers If your browser or browsing device does not support stylesheets at all, the content of each page is still readable.

Accessibility references websites

W3 accessibility guidelines, which explains the reasons behind each guideline.
W3 accessibility techniques, which explains how to implement each guideline.
W3 accessibility checklist, a busy developer's guide to accessibility.

Standards compliance

All pages on this site checked to ensure conformance priority levels 1,2 and where possible level 3, of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. All pages on this site validate as XHTML 1.0 Strict. Check the home page for XHTML validity.

All pages on this site use structured semantic markup. H1 tags are used for main titles, H2 tags for subtitles. For example, on this page, JAWS users can skip to the next section within the accessibility statement by pressing ALT+INSERT+2.