Accessibility Features

This website is intended to be a friendly and accessible experience to all its users.

If you have any questions or suggestions regarding the accessibility, please contact us so we can work to improve the quality of our website.

• We have implemented the following accessibility features on this website to make it easier to use for people with disabilities.
• We strive to obey the spirit of the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) of 1995 with respect to the provision of services online, as required by the Disability Rights Commission (DRC).

Semantic Content

We use clean, rich and ordered content as much as possible in our documents both to help understanding and readability, but also to help those using alternative browsing methods to navigate.

Visitors using recent versions of screen readers can navigate using the following keystrokes:

• 'H' to skip forwards through the headings
• 'Shift + H' to skip backwards through the headings
• '2' to navigate to the next level 2 heading (or a number between 1 and 6 to navigate to the next heading on this level)
• 'Shift + 2' to navigate to the previous level 2 heading (or a number between 1 and 6 to navigate to the previous heading on this level)
• 'INSERT + F6' to provide a list of all headings

Also, the Opera web browser has excellent keyboard navigation. In Opera, the following keys can be used to navigate headings:

• 'S' to skip forwards through the headings
• 'W' to skip backwards through the headings

If text is too small or hard to read

We don't want you to strain your eyes, which is why the site is built to allow the text size to be modified easily. Here is how to change the text size in some popular browsers:

• Firefox 3: 'Ctrl + Plus' makes text larger, 'Ctrl + Minus' makes text smaller and 'Ctrl + 0' resets the size
• Google Chrome: 'Ctrl + Plus' makes text larger, 'Ctrl + Minus' makes text smaller and 'Ctrl + 0' resets the size
• Opera: 'Shift + Plus' makes text larger, 'Ctrl + Minus' makes text smaller and 'Ctrl + 0' resets the size
• Internet Explorer 8: Text size can be set in the 'Page' menu under the 'text size' option.
• Safari: 'Ctrl + Plus' makes text larger and 'Ctrl + Minus' makes text smaller

Access keys

We currently don't support access keys within the sites navigation system.

The reason is that it's difficult to determine whether they actually improve the accessibility of the site or not. If you would like to discuss this with us, please do.

Images

All content images used in this site include descriptive alt attributes. Decorative graphics include empty alt attributes.

Forms

All the forms have a logical tab sequenceand labels are associated with fields using XHTML label tags so they can be skipped easily.

Scripting

Javascript is used on the website to improve usability, but it is possible to browse the website without Javascript.

Style sheets

This site uses cascading style sheets for visual layout. If your browser or browsing device does not support stylesheets at all, the use of structured semantic markup ensures that the content of each page is still readable and clearly structured.

References

• W3 accessibility guidelines, which explains the reasons behind each guideline.
• The RNIB's Web accessibility at a glance
• JAWS, a screen reader for Windows.
• Lynx, a free text-only web browser for blind users with refreshable Braille displays.
• Links, a free text-only web browser for visual users with low bandwidth.
• Windows-Eyes, a screen reader for Windows.
• PwWebSpeak, a screen reader for Windows.