The Equality Act 2010 states unambiguously that private and public sector websites must be accessible with respect to the provision of services online.
The layout takes into account users who are visually impaired, deaf or hard of hearing or have difficulties using a mouse. It has been developed to be compatible with popular screen-reading software, and can be navigated easily using just a keyboard.
The site is tested across all current major browsers and is also optimised for tablets.
The site has also been tested against a Lynx browser. This is a text-only browser with no support for tables, CSS, images, JavaScript, Flash or audio or video content.
Conformance to W3C guidelines
We strive to conform, at a minimum, to Level Double-A compliance as specified by the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0. This also involves implementing a number of selected Priority 3 checkpoints.
Accessibility features
- headings are used in chronological order
- links are written to make sense when read out of context
- all informational images used in this site have appropriate alt text
- cascading stylesheets have been used for layout and presentation
- site has been constructed so that it can be read with styles turned off
- ability to adjust font sizes
- ability to change the background and font colours
- all forms follow a logical tab sequence
- labels are associated with fields in HTML forms
- audio and text transcripts for video and podcasts
- text equivalents for Flash movies
We have not used access keys on this site as they can override keyboard shortcuts for screen readers.
We know some parts of this website are not fully accessible:
- Some older PDF documents are not tagged and do not include ALT text, and are therefore not fully accessible to screen reader software. We have committed to ensuring all new PDF content meets accessibility standards
- Some videos are missing transcripts and captions. We have committed to ensuring all new video content meets accessibility standards