accessibility

Accessibility statement

We have tried to make this website as accessible as possible and easy to use for everyone, regardless of circumstance or ability. All our page templates comply with the WCAG Priority 2 checkpoints as a minimum requirement. And we make every effort to ensure that all the content on our site meets this standard too. We conducted user testing for accessibility during the development of the site, with users with diverse access requirements using a range of assistive technologies. And we commissioned an independent accessibility review and acted on the findings.

We developed the design and layout of the site so that it can be used by blind or partially sighted users (via user defined stylesheets). It is compatible with screen readers and can be navigated without the use of a mouse or keyboard. We are making every effort to ensure that we don't exclude any users. For example:

• We try to use clear and simple language.
• We use alternative text for all our images
• The HTML we produce conforms to the standard: XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS level 2.1

We try to publish all our text content as accessible HTML rather than in other formats such as PDF. Where we do publish PDFs or other formats our policy is to make them as accessible as we can. We decided not to use access keys after they caused confusion in our user testing. (The users who might have benefited from access keys already used keyboard shortcuts, and said that additional, site-specific access keys were not helpful.) Please contact us if you have any questions, if you are having difficulties using the site, or would like to know more about what we are doing to make our websites accessible.