Accessibility
We have tried to remove barriers to our website so that people with disabilities can access information and use the website as easily as possible.
Standards compliance
-
All non-legislation pages on this site comply with priority 1 and 2 guidelines of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
- More information about the guidelines is available on the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative page.
- All pages validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional. They use structured semantic markup.
- All tables have properly scoped header cells, to allow screen readers to render them intelligently. Where required, tables also have a caption and a summary.
Access keys
Most browsers support jumping to specific links by typing keys defined on the web site. The following access keys are available throughout the site:
| 1 ---> Home page |
| 2 ---> Skip to content |
| 4 ---> Quick search |
| 6 ---> Help |
| 9 ---> Contact Us |
| 0 ---> Accessibility (this page) |
Links
Whenever possible, links are written to make sense out of context. Where appropriate, links have title attributes which describe the link in greater detail.
There are no javascript: pseudo-links. All links can be followed in any browser, even if scripting is turned off. There are no links that open new windows without warning.
Visual design
This site uses cascading style sheets for visual layout. If your browser or browsing device does not support stylesheets at all, the content of each page is still readable.
Text Size
Making the text larger or smaller can easily be changed using your browser.
To increase or decrease the text size in Internet Explorer:
- Click on the 'View' menu in your browser
-
Click on the 'Text size' option
- Select the size you would like
to see
To increase or decrease the text size in Netscape
Navigator:
- Click on the 'View' menu in your browser
- Click on the 'Increase Font' option
External Links
All external links will load in a new window. This applies to all PDF's and external sites.
PDF Documents
A number of documents available for viewing are in Adobe® Acrobat® Portable Document Format (PDF).
PDF format is used to preserve the content and layout of our publications. Publications in PDF can only be viewed and printed using the Adobe Acrobat Reader. You can download Acrobat Reader at the Adobe Systems, Inc. site free of charge.
People using screen-reading devices generally are unable to read documents directly in PDF format, until they have an accessibility plug-in installed on their system along with the Adobe Acrobat Reader. This plug-in is available for free from Adobe and your screen reader may do this automatically. Adobe also has online tools that will convert PDF files to HTML on request. To get the plug-in and latest news about Adobe's accessibility tools and services, visit Adobe's Accessability web page.
The website has been tested for the following:
- For colour contrast by printing in black and white and checking how readable the site is
- Different screen resolutions
- Different platforms - MAC and PC
- Different browsers - Internet Explorer 5, 5.5 and 6 and Netscape Navigator 6 and 7
- Without images - a text equivalent is displayed
- Without Cascading Style Sheets - it still works, the content is available and makes sense
- Screen reader software - IBM Home Page Reader v3.0
