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Accessibility

Accessibility Statement

This site is designed to meet the requirements of the Disability Discrimination Act and makes every effort to ensure its communications are accessible to those with special needs, including those with visual, hearing, cognitive and motor impairments.

We have strived to make this web site adhere to a minimum of Priority 1 and 2 Guidelines of the W3 Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which exceeds the European legislative requirements.

The code used to create the site validates as XHTML Transitional and the CSS 2 has also been validated. The pages use structured semantic markup where necessary.

Links

Many links have title attributes which describe the link in greater detail, and in the majority of cases the text of the link already fully describes the target. Wherever possible, links are written to make sense out of context. Many browsers (such as JAWS, Home Page Reader, Lynx and Opera) can extract the list of links on a page and allow you to browse the links separately from the page.

Link text is never duplicated. Two links on the same page with the same link text always point to the same address.

Some links on the site will open a new browser window (when the link target is not on this site).
Links to our policies, including our Privacy Statement, our Terms & Conditions and this Accessibility Statement appear on the home page and in appropriate sections.
Images

Decorative and functional images feature null ALT attributes. Other images on the site include descriptive ALT attributes.

Colour

Foreground and background colours contrast well throughout the site, with the majority of content appearing a light off white on dark green. Colour is never used as a sole method of grouping data.

Layout

The site is free of frames and uses a cascading style sheet for visual layout. Tables are used for tabular data, but we have avoided using them to dictate the layout of a page wherever possible.

The style sheet uses mainly but not exclusively relative font sizes and is written to display pages correctly in most commonly-used browsers. In early versions of browsers and browsing devices that do not support style sheets at all, the flow of the content has been tested to ensure it entirely retains its sense.

Javascript

The site has been configured to allow users access to its full range of functionality whether or not they have java script enabled in their browsers. Where java script is used, it is only used to enhance the user experience. It is never essential.