Accessibility statement
This website aims to make the content easy to use for as many people as possible, regardless of their disability or impairment.
Although we have taken steps to make this site as easy to use as possible we need your comments to improve it, so we welcome your questions or comments. You can let us know what you think about the site by contacting our communications team.
This accessibility statement tells you what we have done to meet the needs of disabled people:
Standards Compliance
What are the standards?
The Word Wide Web Consortium (W3C) have written a number of standards and guides to help website developers ensure that the sites they are building are accessible to as many people as possible.
- All pages on this site are XHTML, with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for layout. Tables are used for data, wherever needed.
- Our website is designed to comply with the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Accessibility Initiative (W3CWAI) Level 2 (AA) guidelines as a minimum but where possible we comply with the higher level 3 (AAA) guidelines.
- All pages on this site use structured semantic markup. H1 tags are used for main titles, H2 tags for subtitles.
Access Keys
There are a number of keyboard shortcuts, or access keys, to help site users as detailed below.
- Alt + 1 Home page
- Alt + 3 Site map
- Alt + 4 Search
- Alt + 9 Contact us
- Alt + 0 Accessibility
The keyboard shortcuts are intended to help users who have difficulty in using a mouse. This web site uses the UK Government access key system.
Note: please keep in mind that there can be variations on how to enter the access keys depending on the browser your are using. Firefox, for example, uses the combination
Alt + Shift + Number.
Browsealoud
This website is Browsealoud enabled. Browsealoud is a speech enabling program that makes web content more accessible to anyone with difficulties reading. Simply by hovering your mouse pointer over an area of text, Browsealoud will read that text out loud. Browsealoud not only speech enables the website content, it will also speak out loud the menus and hyperlinks, helping you navigate the website more easily. All you have to do to take advantage of this service, is download the free Browsealoud program.
For further details about this application including system requirements, visit the Browsealoud website.