Accessibility

When creating this website, we applied standard-compliant technologies to make sure that the information is accessible.

What accessibility features are used on this site?

This site uses many features to make information more accessible:

• This site follows World Wide Web Consortium recommendations and accessibility guidelines.
• To make sure that all information is displayed consistently on every page, we have applied Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).
• All pages contain metadata which gives an overall description of the page.
• You can navigate the site using Access Keys–this is where you use your keyboard rather than your mouse to get around the site.
• All text on this site uses relative font sizes, so you can enlarge or reduce the text by using the text size options in your browser.
• All images have text alternates that describe what the image is showing.

The World Wide Web Consortium recommendations

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)–along with other groups and standards bodies–has established technologies for creating and interpreting web-based content. These technologies–called “web standards”, are carefully designed to make sure that as many web users as possible can benefit from a website. They also ensure that documents published on the web can be accessed and used for a long time.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

This site uses Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)–they determine the style and presentation of the information on the site such as fonts, colours, margins and borders. CSS allow the content to be separated from design which is a helpful tool when new content is added.

You can, however, view the pages on this site without stylesheets. Disabling stylesheets will only affect the design and presentation of content–no actual information will be lost.

xHTML

xHTML combines the more powerful and versatile XML with the familiar web language of HTML. xHTML is designed to allow richer web pages to display on various browser platforms, including mobile phones, PDAs and TVs.

The xHTML tags used on this site also provide additional information about structural items–for example, summary descriptions of tables, explanations of hierarchy within tables, emphasis on certain words and phrases, explanation of abbreviations and structure of forms. These tags are often hidden in visual browsers but provide valuable information to non-visual browsers.

JavaScript

Parts of this site use JavaScript to improve site design, enable user–interaction and validate forms. Wherever JavaScript is used, it has been carefully considered and implemented so that it does not affect the accessibility. In particular, we have worked to:

• make sure that JavaScript is directly accessible;
• make sure that the browser functionality is not modified to cause confusion or make it less accessible.

Metadata

Metadata has been added to all pages to provide important orientation information to users.

The metadata provided includes:

• a meaningful page title;
• the document language (for example, English);
• a !DOCTYPE statement that declares the type of document;
• a description of the site’s content;
• keywords describing the site’s contents.

Navigating the site

We have applied a consistent navigation structure on all pages of this site. Use the navigation bar to see which section of the site you are currently viewing. The page you are on will be clearly highlighted in the navigation bar.

Access Keys

The Access Keys implemented throughout this site allow you to select a link using your keyboard instead of your mouse. For a full list of the Access Keys used on this site, see Access Keys page.

Text and text size

Most navigation elements used on this site are displayed in plain text. Whenever graphics are used, we have provided text alternatives.

If you would like to increase the size of the text, go to ‘View’ in the browser’s main menu, and select the option ‘Text zoom’, ‘Text magnification’, ‘Text size’ or ‘Font size’. This option will display a sub-menu option that lets you adjust the text size.

Colour

The site uses colours that provide enough contrast for users who are colour blind.

Images

The images on this site have been carefully considered, and use text alternates to enhance accessibility.

Lists

Many of the lists used within this site have title attributes–these describe the content of the list in greater detail. Text that follow a logical and structured order are marked up as lists.

Using the right browser

To get the best experience of this site and take full advantage of its features, we suggest you use a standards-compliant browser that supports numerous web standards including CSS, xHTML and the DOM (a universal means of controlling the behaviour of web pages). These are our recommended browsers:

• Mozilla Firefox 2+
• Internet Explorer 7+
• Safari

This site was designed to take full advantage of version 6+ browsers. You can still view the site on a version 4 browser without losing any information, but the design might look different because older browsers don’t support Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) fully.

Browser support & testing

This website has been tested with the following browsers.

Bandwidth considerations and processor speed

We have made sure that this website is as bandwidth-friendly as possible. However, we recommend that you access this site with a fast connection to the Internet (for example DSL, ISDN, Cable, T-1) and a computer operating at 500MHz or faster.

Accessibility references and software

References

• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
• Techniques for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
• Checklist of Checkpoints for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0

Accessibility software

• JAWS, a screen reader for Windows.
• Home Page Reader, a screen reader for Windows.
• Lynx, a free text-only web browser for blind users with refreshable Braille displays.
• Links, a free text-only web browser for visual users with low bandwidth.
• Opera, a visual browser with many accessibility-related features.