Accessibility

This website has been designed to be as accessible as possible, through clear content, structure and ease of navigation.

"The power of the web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect."
Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the World Wide Web

Steve Ballmer, President of Microsoft, states that accessible design is good design. Promoting accessible web sites not only makes information accessible to people with disabilities, but enhances the functionality and universality of the web.

This does not mean that you have to design for people with disabilities. It does not mean you have to design for screen readers. It means you should consider the end to end process carefully before commencing a project and think about how you can implement design that is useful for everyone. For example, can a person access all the information without using a mouse?

Cognatively impaired means that a person has difficulty processing and managing information. Many people with cognative difficulties will not tell their colleagues.

This website has been designed, as far as possible to fall in line with the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) guidelines, and those standards outlined in the Disability Discriminations Act 1995 (DDA), which is intended to help users who may be -

• vision impaired
• hearing impaired
• physically impaired
• cognatively impaired
• literacy impaired

The following information will help all users, including those with disabilities, make the most of our accessibility options and features.

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).

No “javascript” pseudo-links are used. All links can be followed in any browser even if javascript is switched off.

Visual Design:

All parts of the site use Cascading Style Sheets for visual layout and design. If your browser does not support stylesheets all pages should still be readable.

Images:

All images contain descriptive alternate (ALT) attributes.

If you have any comments or questions please let us know, we welcome any feedback.