Accessibility Statement

We recognise the responsibility of providing a website that is accessible to all user groups, including the disabled. We have implemented the following accessibility features on this website to make it easier to use for people with disabilities.

Access keys

We have provided a series of keyboard shortcuts intended to help users who have difficulty in using pointing devices such as a mouse. Most browsers support jumping to specific links by typing keys defined on the web site. On Windows, press ALT+ the relevant access key; on Macintosh, press Control+ the relevant access key. Then press Enter to activate the link. (Control+ALT+ the relevant access key in Safari 4 OSX 10.5 onward)

All pages on this site define the following access keys:

Access key 1 - Home
Access key 3 - Sitemap
Access key 9 - Contact us
Access key 0 - Accessibility statement (this page)
Access key T - Top of page

These access keys are selected in accordance with the UK Government's e-envoy guidelines.

Standards compliance

Each page on this site complies with all Priority 1 checkpoints from the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. This is a judgement call; many guidelines are intentionally vague and can not be tested automatically. All pages on this site use structured semantic markup. H1 tags are used for main titles, H2 tags for subtitles. Navigation menus are marked up as HTML lists. This ensures that the number of links in the list is read out at the start and it can be skipped easily.

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 empty ALT attributes.

Visual design

This site uses cascading style sheets for visual layout. This site uses only 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.