Standards compliance
- All pages on this site is WCAG AA approved, complying wih the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Again, this is a judgement call; many guidelines are intentionally vague and can not be tested automatically. We have reviewed all the guidelines and believe that all these pages are in compliance.
- Most pages are even WCAG AAA approved.
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
ALTattributes. Purely decorative graphics include nullALTattributes. - In addition, some images have been moved into the background where possible.
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 style-sheets at all, the content of each page is still readable.
Browser Compatibility
We have ensured that the website template set displays on all current browsers including Internet Explorer 6+, Opera 7+, Firefox 3+ and Mozilla/Netscape 7+, Safari 3+, Nintendo WII. If you do not have one of these, we recommend you upgrade as these browsers support web standards which in turn support the provision of fully functional web services for all users.
Tables
Where tables are used, we endeavor to ensure that they are written using semantic markup which includes properly labeled header cells to allow screen readers to render the data intelligently. We also endeavor to only use tables in page content where there is a real need for them, in the case of tabular data, for example.
Increasing the text size
You can increase the text size within your browser:
- If you use Microsoft Internet Explorer, go to the View menu, select Text Size and then either Larger or Largest.
- If you use Netscape Navigator, go to the View menu and choose Increase Font until the text is the size you require.
- If you use Mozilla Firefox, go to the View menu and Text Size: increase until the text is the size you require
Skip Navigation
A function is provided for users of adaptive devices to allow them to skip through the main navigation on each page if they do wish. Screen readers will read out each and every menu option exhaustively on each page, so this function allows a user to go directly to the page content if they wish.