Accessibility statement
We thought it would be helpful if we explained the steps we have taken to ensure that this site is accessible to as many people as possible.
What is Accessibility?
According to the Web Accessibility Initiative:
Web accessibility means that people with disabilities can use the Web. More specifically, Web accessibility means that people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with the Web, and that they can contribute to the Web.
In practical terms, we've built this site to be as flexible as possible. This affords all users choice in how they prefer to use the site.
The truth is we don't know who will visit our site or what challenges they may face. They may have some physical reason why they might find it difficult to get to the information they want, even if it's 'just' colour blindness, or there may be a technological one like an unusual browser.
We can't guarantee we've thought of everything but at least we've made an effort to give everyone some options.
So what have we done to help?
Well, here goes...
- Pages on this site use structured semantic markup. This means the website is designed to make sense without any visual styles applied (e.g. colours, fonts etc.). Try and imagine how any other document written in Microsoft Word would look. It would have a heading, some paragraphs and sub headings and then a list of links to the rest of the site - that should give you the general idea for the way our site is coded.
- Text can be changed to suit user preferences. Using Microsft Internet Explorer 7 this can be done via the Page | Text size menu.
- The site is designed to display consistently using a window size of 1024 x 768, irrespective of text size. Most pages will display cogently at much narrower window sizes although some of the visual layout may degrade.
- Pages on this site were designed to conform to Bobby AA requirements for web accessibility but it's a pretty subjective test. Nonetheless, that's what we've aimed for.
- Pages on this site were designed to conform to WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) A requirements for web accessibility produced by the W3C. Again there's an element of subjective assessment here.
- Pages on this site are Section 508 approved, so for what it's worth they comply with all of the US Federal Government Section 508 Guidelines from the US Rehabilitation Act. And yes, you're right, some of this is subjective!
- All pages on this site validate as HTML 4.01 Strict.
- All pages on this site validate to CSS specification.
PDFs
Occasionally we may use PDF documents. If we do:
- We will make sure these open in a separate, new window.
- PDF documents can be viewed using Adobe Acrobat Reader. You may wish to download the current version (this link will open in a new window).
Site links
- We've done our best to make sure that links will sense out of context. This means that although there are links that simply say 'Read more', we've added title attributes to those links to say where they go. They should appear if you hover over the link but that depends on your browser.
- Unless otherwise indicated, links do not open in new windows.
Images
- All content images use
ALT attributes to add descriptive information. This will appear if the image fails to download.
- Images used just for styling purposes use empty
ALT attributes so if they don't download, nothing appears.
Design
- The visual design of the site is achieved using CSS (Cascading Stylesheets).
- If your browser does not support this technology, the information will still be readable because of the semantic structure we've used to build our pages.
Browsers
- We have tested this website in Microsoft Internet Explorer versions 6 and 7 and Firefox 1.5 so it should work on these and later versions of these browsers.
- There may nonetheless be slight visual differences in the way each of these browsers display the website pages but broadly you'll see what we wanted you to see.
- For best results we recommend Firefox as a browser, but wouldn't dream of insisting!
Javascript
- JavaScript has been used throughout this site, mainly to open some links in new windows and display photos from flickr.
- If you don't have Javascript installed or enabled on your browser, don't worry. Everything that is reachable with Javascript available is reachable without. It just won't necessarily be as slick.
So there you go. If you've read this far you probably have good reasons for your interest in accessibility and the web. We hope that the efforts we've made are helpful, if not, please feel free to drop us a line with any specific issue.
