Accessibility Features

This site is designed to be accessible to screen readers.

Accesskeys

Users with mobility problems and unable to use a mouse can navigate via the main menu using the following accesskeys,

Access keys are supported in different ways by different web browsers:

Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE) works by moving to the specified link, i.e. selecting that link ready for the user to activate it by pressing <enter>, whereas Mozilla activates the link immediately when the appropriate key combination is pressed, Alt+Shift-<accesskey>.

e.g.   In MSIE, keying Alt-1 <enter> takes the user to the Home page whereas in Mozilla keying Alt+Shift-1 is sufficient to take the user to the page.

Accessible Design

With usability, accessibilty and portability in mind, this site is written in XHTML 1.0 and uses CSS to give an elastic design which will display well on different screen sizes and browsers.

The size of the text on this website is set in qualitative instead of quantitative terms. As a result your web browser can easily override the base text size and all of the text will change relative to the size you specify. This is easily demonstrated using Microsoft Internet Explorer's 'Text Size' option: to increase the size of the text select 'View' -> 'Text Size' -> 'Largest': this increases the size of all the text proportionally.

Please be aware that changing the base text size whilst browsing this website will impact upon its layout: the site has been designed to 'flow' to fill the browser window (to make use of the extra space available at higher screen resolutions) but increasing text size to a very large value may cause some page elements to overlap.

Cascading Style Sheets

All of the formatting on this site is accomplished with the use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). This means that you can use the CSS functions provided by your web browser to override any/all of the formatting used on this site, or indeed to remove all formatting. For more information about viewing web pages using your own style sheets instead of those provided by a website's author we refer you to the help files provided with your web browser.