Accessibility features

We offer the following accessibility features on our site:

• a skip to content link to help screen reader and keyboard users access content quickly
• a search facility and sitemap
• resizable text using browser text resize tools
• a flexible full window page layout, the columns resize with the width of your browser window

Accessibility and usability of our site

Our website strives to uphold the principles and best practice of the WCAG 1.0 AAA guidelines.

Our website's code

The site has been designed and developed to comply with XHTML and CSS2 standards. The website code has been checked for accessibility using a range of automated and manual checks.

Skip to navigation Link

At the top of every page are hidden links that will appear when 'tabbed to' using a keyboard. These links will be read by screen-reading software. The links allow a user to:

• 'skip to content' - Jump to the content on the current page
• 'skip to navigation' - Jump to the website naviagtion links
• 'skip to footer' - Jump down to the page footer

Documents

In order to publish large and/or complex documents it is sometimes necessary to provide the information in Adobe (.pdf) and Microsoft Word (.doc) files.

 A pdf reader is required to view pdf files. A free Acrobat® reader can be downloaded from the Adobe website.

 A Word reader can be downloaded from the Microsoft website.

Useful links

The BBC My Web My Way and AbilityNet websites provide an excellent guide to changing the colours, text size and style of websites.

Feedback

We welcome feedback on the Accessibility and usability of our website. If you have had any problems or any issues while using our site, we would like to hear about it!

Please use our contact form to alert us to any accessibility issues.

Search keywords

Metadata is the term used to describe additional information about a web page, such as the author of the page and a summary of the page contents. This information is grouped into sections called metatags which are hidden from view in the code of the web page. The 'keywords' metatag stores a list of keywords which relate to the content of the page and are historically used by search engines to match the most relevant page to the words that a person types into a search engine. Most search engines no longer use metadata when crawling websites to compile their indexes (including Google, Yahoo, Lycos and Altavista) and now ignore the content of the keywords metatag due to misuse of the tag by some websites. We have found that keywords can greatly improve the accuracy of searches carried out by users of our website. One of the main reasons for the greater accuracy is that some of the search engines do not correctly interpret the information that is present in the text of the page. For example someone searching for mountain will get different results to someone searching for mountains, due to the way search engines interpret plurals. We have decided to include relevant keywords on our web pages to cover a range of possible search words a user may enter. This helps to ensure that users of our site are taken to the correct page when they search, making it easier for them to access the content we provide and making our website more user-friendly.