This site has been designed to be accessible to all users, irrespective of browser type, speed of connection or physical ability.

Resizing Text
All text on this site has a relative font size, so text can be enlarged or reduced using the text size options available in visual browsers.

To change the size of the text in Internet Explorer go to:
View > Text Size

To change the size of the text in Netscape Navigator go to:
Edit > Preferences > Appearance > Fonts

To change the size of the text in Opera go to:
File > Preferences > Fonts > Minimum font size

Alternatively, if you have a mouse with a wheel, hold down the CTRL key on your keyboard whilst moving the wheel backwards, to increase the text size, or forwards, to reduce the text size.

Visual design
This site uses Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for visual layout.

Images
All content images used in this site include descriptive alt attributes.

Links
Please note that all links to external sites will open in a new browser window.

Links have title attributes which describe the link in greater detail, unless the text of the link already fully describes the target.

W3C Web Standards
An integral requirement of conforming to the W3C Accessibility Guidelines is that the design and coding of all web pages adheres to the W3C Web Standards.

By designing to Web Standards, the informational content of web pages becomes accessible to many more people, irrespective of their physical ability or the internet browsing device that they may be using.

What are Web Standards?
Web page content is coded, or marked-up, using HTML (HyperText Markup Language). This HTML mark-up defines, for example, which parts of the content are headings, where the paragraph or line-breaks should go, which parts are click able links, etc. Traditionally, it has also specified how this content should look, by specifying properties such as font size and colour for the different parts of the page, background colours, etc.

By adopting W3C Web Standards, we break from this tradition and use only semantic HTML mark-up. In fact, we use XHTML (i.e. eXtensible HTML), which is just HTML coded to a stricter standard.

Semantic XHTML means that the mark-up only defines what each part of the content is, not how it should look. That is, the mark-up identifies which elements in the content are headings, paragraphs, links, list items, etc. It does not specify what these elements should look like, nor how and where they will be positioned on the page.

Even on older browsers or text-only devices that may not react to modern CSS stylesheets, the content is still fully readable and usable. It may not have the same colourful backgrounds and graphics, etc., but it will be fully usable none the less. This is the fundamental principle behind the use of Web Standards.

If you have any further suggestions on making this site more accessible please email them to us by using our contact page>>