Accessibility

Site layout

Cascading style sheets

Cascading style sheets (CSS) are used in this site to separate content from the display. The CSS contains positioning, layout, font, colours and style information for the entire web site.

Separating style from content makes life very easy for visitors who prefer to view only the content of a web page, or to modify the content. These could be blind or partially sighted people who might use a screen reader to interpret a page.

CSS also reduces the size of the HTML files. The CSS file is downloaded just once by the visitor's browser and re-used for different pages on a web site. This reduces the bandwidth requirements for your server and also ensures a faster download for your visitors.

Access keys

Most browsers support jumping to specific links by typing keys defined on the web site. On Windows, you can press ALT SHIFT + an access key; on Macintosh, you can press Control + an access key.

All pages on this site define the following access keys:

• h - Home
• s - Sitemap
• c - Contact

Navigation

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

Images

All images used on this site include descriptive attributes. Purely decorative graphics include empty alt attributes

Text contrast

We have checked the site's font and background colour combination against the different colour blindness conditions and ensured that all information is still clear.

Adjusting text size

This website is built using relative font sizes, which means that if you want to see larger or smaller text.

Or the user can change the text size using the browser. In Internet Explorer this is done by going to the top menu and selecting 'View', then 'Text Size'. Medium is the usual setting, so selecting Larger or Largest will increase the text size. Similar facilities exist in other browsers, normally on the 'View' menu. Your browser's 'Help' menu should give you further information about making these adjustments.

Standards compliance

Validation

All the style sheets on the site have are CSS validated and conform to W3C recommendations.

All pages on this site are XHTML validated and conform to W3C recommendations.

Standards compliance

This website currently meets all priority 1 guidelines of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines,

• I strive to obey the spirit of the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) of 1995 with respect to the provision of services online, as required by the Disability Rights Commission (DRC).
• While we use Bobby to test for accessibility, it is just one aspect of our testing procedure. As a computer programme, the Bobby test is not a reliable as expert evaluation.
• The website meets Bobby Approval at Level 1 and adopts many of the recommendations at Levels 2 and 3.
• Also the website meets Hermish Approval at Priority 1 ,2 and 3.

UK legislation

Through taking this approach I hope to make this site as inclusive as possible, and also to comply with UK legislation including the Disability Discrimination Act (1995) as amended by the Special Education Needs and Disability Act (2001), which states that it is an offence to discriminate against a disabled person by treating him or her less favourably than others for a reason relating to their disability.