Sunday 20 July 2008

Accessibility


Accessibility

We are committed to making the content of this website as accessible to as many people as possible. Under the current Disability Discrimination Act (DDA), goods and services must be provided on equal terms to anyone with a disability.
We are working towards WAI Level II accessibility on our site. This is a set of guidelines developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). We have already incorporated a number of accessibility features into our website.

External Links to other websites

All links to other websites will open a new browser window, and will be marked up as an external link if it hasn't been made clear in the text that the link is going to an external website.

Current features include:

  • No use of frames in the main section of the website. Some of the databases used on this site do still use frames and we are working to eliminate them completely.
  • Use of alternative text descriptions (alt text), to describe the content of an image. For Internet Explorer users, additional 'title tags' on images and hyperlinks where appropriate.
  • Accessibility focus group which includes people with visual impairments and colour blindness with who we consult on new designs, colours and functionality of the website.
  • Limited use of attachments to enable users to access as much of the content as possible. Where information is unavoidably provided in an alternative format, namely as a pdf document.
  • Links to Adobe Acrobat are provided where attachments are used, enabling users to download this free software. Please note that at the moment there are still some documents in others formats on this site that we are in process of reviewing and updating as necessary.