Access Keys
Most browsers support jumping to specific links by typing keys defined on the web site. On Windows, you can press ALT + an access key; on Macintosh, you can press Control + an access key.
All pages on this site use the following access keys:
- Access key 0: Accessibility statement
- Access key 1: Home page
- Access key 3: Site map
We will add additional access keys to help navigate our site once there is an agreed standard for their use.
Standards compliance
The majority of pages on this site meet the highest accessibility standards: 95% of pages are WCAG "AAA" approved, complying wih all priority 1, 2 and 3 guidelines of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. We made this assessment by carrying out a manual accessibility audit and by using automated tools (Bobby and Cynthia Says). For example, if you check our home page with Bobby you will see that it passes all of the "AAA" requirements that can be automatically checked.
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The remaining pages are WCAG "A" approved or better, complying wih all priority 1 guidelines. We expect to convert these pages to AAA compliance in the near future.
All pages on this site use structured semantic markup. H1 tags are used for main titles, H2 tags for subtitles, etc.
Our pages validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional. For example, you can validate our home page.
Links
Links are written to make sense out of context and we avoid "click here!" links.
Some links have title attributes which describe the link in greater detail.
There are no javascript: pseudo-links. All links can be followed in any browser, even if scripting is turned off. There are no links that open new windows without warning.
Images
All functional and conceptually important images used in this site include descriptive ALT attributes. We use null ALT attributes for spacer images and for "eye candy".
Complex images (such as figures) include a D-link to explain the significance of each image to readers who cannot, or choose not to, view images. We use style sheets to hide the D-links in visual browsers.
Scripts
This site uses a small number of scripts (such as an "e-mail address garbler" to prevent spammers harvesting our e-mail address). Wherever we use scripts, we also include a NOSCRIPT element to make the page accessible to people who do not enable Javascript in their browser.
Visual design
This Website is constructed entirely out of CSS formatting elements. There are no tables (other than data tables). This site uses cascading style sheets for visual layout. We use valid CSS. For example, you can validate our style sheet.
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.
Browser compatibility
Our site is designed to work with all browsers on all platforms. Before publishing new material, we visually check every page for accessibility using Firefox with images and style sheets turned off.
Further reading
If you are a web developer and want to find out more about accessibility, we recommend Dive Into Accessibility. Our own accessibility statement is based on the guidance at this site.
How to report accessibility problems
If you come across any access barriers with our site, please let us know and we will do our best to fix them.