accessibility

We are committed to complying with the Disability Discrimination Act and have made significant improvements to our website in order to reduce the barriers experienced by people with disabilities.

By following Government guidelines, it is our policy to create pages to W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Priority 2 level (Double A).

In the future we aim to offer more online services and we are designing these to be level 3 (Triple A) compliant, although if we purchase "off-the-shelf" software this will be at least level 2 compliant.

We are aware, however, that occasionally we do make mistakes. If you find any of our pages inaccessible please use the Website Feedback Form to let us know. Please include details of the technology you are using and we will make every reasonable effort to either remove the barrier or provide the information in a format that you find acceptable.

• access keys 

• resizing text

• low graphics pages

• downloadable documents

access keys

If you have difficulty in using a mouse or similar devices, you can use keyboard shortcuts. We follow the government's access key system.

The keyboard shortcuts are:

How do I use the access keys for my browser?

• Internet Explorer 5+: Hold down the ALT key and select the number/letter of the access key, then press ENTER.

• Internet Explorer 4: Hold down the ALT key and select the number/letter of the access key.

• Internet Explorer 5+ for Mac: Hold down the CTRL key and select the number/letter of the access key

• Internet Explorer 4.5 for Mac: Access keys are not supported.

• Netscape 6+: Hold down the ALT key and select the number/letter of the access key.

• Netscape earlier versions: Access keys are not supported.

• Mozilla: Hold down the ALT key and select the number/letter of the access key.

resizing text

If the text is too small for you to read comfortably then you can resize it. Instructions are given for major browsers below:

• Internet Explorer 4:

  • Choose View > Internet Options…> Accessibility… and check the ignore font sizes specified on web pages option. Click OK, OK, and then you can alter the text size using the View>Text Size option

• Internet Explorer (version 5 and later):

  • Choose Tools > Internet Options > Accessibility… and check the ignore font sizes specified on web pages option. Click OK, OK, and then you can alter the text size using the View>Text Size option.

• Mozilla FireFox:

  • Select the keys CTRL and + (From menu: View, Text Size, Increase) together to increase text size and CTRL and - to reduce it (From menu: View, Text Size, Decrease).
    

• All other browsers:
  • should be able to resize the text directly from the menu bar. Please see your specific browser help pages if you are having difficulty.

low graphics pages

Although not strictly text-only, these pages are quicker to download and useful if you don't need the images or if you are on a slow connection.  

downloadable documents

Where possible we try to provide downloadable documents in different formats including PDF and rich text format.

If you have difficulties obtaining information from a PDF you can use Adobe's web-based conversion service to produce an HTML version.  However, please be aware that the standard of HTML produced is not very good.

We appreciate that it is frustrating to be unable to access information.  Please bear with us whilst we continue to work on improving the accessibility of our site.

If any downloadable document presents a barrier to accessing information, please contact us with details of the document in question, the problems encountered and what we could do to help.