Our Policies

Accessibility

Standards compliance
Every page on this site uses structured semantic markup. H1 tags are used for section titles, H2 tags for main page titles (and H3 and H4 tags for sub titles). Certain specialist browsers, such as screen readers allow users to navigate through pages by headings and sub-headings when they are properly marked-up in this way.

Navigation aids
Every page on this site begins with invisible ‘Skip to content’ links which allows users of text only and screen reader browsers to skip over page headers and navigation bars and go straight to the either the main navigation menu or the main page content. All dropdown menus are accessible using the tab key.

Links
Links are written to make sense out of context.

Images
All content images used in this site include ALT attributes. Screen readers read will read this text, and text-only browsers will display it so that, at the very least, users who have problems seeing images can access a sense of what the images are communicating.

Visual design
This site uses cascading style sheets for its visual layout and text formatting. The size of all of the text on this site can be manipulated by users via the ‘text size’ options in visual browsers. All key content, all body text and of all of the text contained in navigation menus can be increased or decreased by users.

If your browser or browsing device does not support stylesheets at all, the content of each page is still readable.

Forms
All of the input elements in the forms on this site are marked up with label tags. These provide several benefits:

  • Users who have difficulty navigating through a form with a mouse can, for example, click on the text beside the form elements, such as text input boxes, in order to enter those elements.
  • The use of label tags allows screen readers to intelligently announce what a particular input element is, by reading the label.