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This site has been designed to be accessible to all
users, irrespective of browser type, speed of connection
or physical ability.
All text on this site has a relative font size, so
text can be enlarged or reduced using the text size
options available in visual browsers.
To change the size of the text in Internet
Explorer go to:
View > Text Size
To change the size of the text in Netscape
Navigator go to:
Edit > Preferences > Appearance > Fonts
To change the size of the text in Opera go
to:
File > Preferences > Fonts > Minimum font
size
Alternatively, if you have a mouse with a wheel,
hold down the CTRL key on your keyboard whilst moving
the wheel backwards, to increase the text size, or
forwards, to reduce the text size.
This site uses Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for visual
layout.
All content images used in this site include descriptive
alt attributes.
Please note that all links to external sites will
open in a new browser window.
Links have title attributes which describe the link
in greater detail, unless the text of the link already
fully describes the target.
An integral requirement of conforming to the W3C Accessibility
Guidelines is that the design and coding of all web
pages adheres to the W3C Web Standards.
By designing to Web Standards, the informational
content of web pages becomes accessible to many more
people, irrespective of their physical ability or
the internet browsing device that they may be using.
The following W3C reference links lay down the content
mark-up and styling standards that we have adopted,
and that the web as a whole is moving towards:
Web page content is coded, or marked-up, using HTML
(HyperText Markup Language). This HTML mark-up defines,
for example, which parts of the content are headings,
where the paragraph or line-breaks should go, which
parts are click able links, etc. Traditionally, it
has also specified how this content should look, by
specifying properties such as font size and colour
for the different parts of the page, background colours,
etc.
By adopting W3C Web Standards, we break from this
tradition and use only semantic HTML mark-up. In fact,
we use XHTML (i.e. eXtensible HTML), which is just
HTML coded to a stricter standard.
Semantic XHTML means that the mark-up only defines
what each part of the content is, not how it should
look. That is, the mark-up identifies which elements
in the content are headings, paragraphs, links, list
items, etc. It does not specify what these elements
should look like, nor how and where they will be positioned
on the page.
Even on older browsers or text-only devices that
may not react to modern CSS stylesheets, the content
is still fully readable and usable. It may not have
the same colourful backgrounds and graphics, etc.,
but it will be fully usable none the less. This is
the fundamental principle behind the use of Web Standards.
If you have any further suggestions on making this
site more accessible please email them to us by using
our contact page:
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