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Accessibility Policy

This site is built in XHTML 1.0 Transitional. All pages should validate against the relevant document type declaration using the World Wide Web (W3C) validator.

Accessibility standards

We aim to provide web content that conforms to level AA of the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. All the pages on this site were tested before being published. If you think we are not achieving these standards, please contact us and tell us the URL of the page and any problems you have found. We will do our best to fix them.

This site uses Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for visual presentation and avoids the use of tables. Tables are used solely for tabular data. Some of our CSS styles are not specified in the CSS 2.1 specification, but are specified in CSS3 as it currently stands. Browsers which do not support these rules should simply ignore them.

Where possible, purely decorative images are called from CSS. If they are referenced using the (img) element they have been given a null alt attribute (alt=""). All content and functionality on the site is available without JavaScript. Form validation is performed by the server.

Testing

All the pages on this site were subject to the following tests before publication:

  • Link Text is present.
  • Text is left aligned.
  • Text equivalent exists for every non-text element.
  • Write valid HTML/XHTML.
  • No style information included in HTML. Style is applied from a stylesheet.
  • Correct use of HTML heading tags to convey structure.
  • Lists and list items are marked up properly.
  • Quotations are marked up properly
  • Specify the expansion of each abbreviation or acronym where it first occurs on the page/document, ensuring HTML elements are used properly here.
  • Don't use table for layout unless it is for tabular data and will make sense when linearised.
  • Organise content so it can still be read without a CSS stylesheet.
  • Confirm page is still usable when scripts are turned off.
  • Ensure that any input handlers are device and client independent. Specify logical event handlers rather than device dependant event handlers.
  • Logical tab order is implemented throughout the document/tool.
  • Avoid deprecated HTML elements.
  • Associate labels explicitly with their controls.