Website Accessibility

The BBC has an excellent web accessibility guide, which gives very useful website accessibility help.

We are actively working towards getting the main content pages of our website to comply with the Priority 3 checklist of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and all other pages to level 2, to ensure a high standard of accessibility for our visitors.

The following points highlight the steps taken to make the site as accessible as possible:

• Semantic HTML has been used to give pages a meaningful structure, even without style sheets.
• Images have been handled in the following manner:
  • Graphical text uses a technique to replace images that will degrade to standard text when viewed using accessibility software or without style sheets.
  • Alternative text attributes also ensure that information contained in images is accessible by other means than viewing the image.
• So that visitors can find information easily, a site map gives an overview of the structure of the site.
• So that visitors using text based versions can still understand all content, no information is exclusively conveyed using colour.

Browser Compatability

Web browsers view websites in slightly different ways, this means the way a site looks on one browser may not be the way it looks on another.

We have tested this site in the following browsers to ensure our site works in the same way in each.

• Firefox 3.6+
• Internet Explorer 7.0+
• Google Chrome [latest stable version]
• Opera [latest stable version]
• Safari 5.1.2+

If you have difficulty using our site or would like any more information, please contact our marketing team.