Accessibility

Accessibility features

The information on our website should be easy to access by everyone. To achieve this goal, we have tried to make the site as "user-friendly" as possible, and made every effort to make it usable for users with a visual impairment.

We have tried to make the site as simple and easy to use as possible, with features including:

• Full site search, covering the contents of every page
• Clear and consistent navigation, with main categories available on every page

We have also made sure that the website complies with all relevant standards, so that information is available to those using non-standard browsers and assistive technologies such as text-to-speech software. 

Because we use the newest technologies, users with a visual impairment don't have to use a downgraded, "text-only" version of the site. The cost of using new technology is that the design does not look at its best in older browsers.

Please note: We open external links in new windows by default. We believe this is a useful feature, but we are aware that some accessibility guidelines advise against it.

Standards

This site is Double-A compliant to WAI and Bobby guidelines, as recommended by the Royal National Institute of the Blind (UK). Conformance to these guidelines help make the Web more accessible to users with disabilities and benefit all users.

There are too many accessibililty features to list here, but some of the more interesting or relevant features include:

• pages are organized to be fully functional, even with javascript turned off
• all text uses relative font sizes so text can be enlarged or reduced using the text size options available in visual browsers (see instructions below)
• all pages use flexible page formats so pages can be automatically resized for different window sizes and screen resolutions
• all pages are designed with separate cascading style sheets, so they can be replaced by user-defined style sheets
• changes in function of differents parts of a page (e.g. navigation, content) are clearly labelled when using adaptive technology
• changes in language are labelled clearly
• use of extra metadata generates standardised navigation in supported browsers (Lynx, iCab, Mozilla, Firebird and Opera)

Browser-specific instructions

You can alter text size using your website browser. The procedure for doing so differs from one browser to the next. The instructions below outline the procedure for some popular browsers. If your browser does not appear here, in general you will get somewhere by following these guidelines: looking under the "View" selection on the main menu, you should find an option called "Text Zoom" or "Text Magnification" or "Text Size" or "Font Size". From that point it should be relatively simple to find and select an additional sub menu option that adjusts text size to your needs.

You can find more information about increasing or decreasing the text size on the Web Accessibility Initiative page.