Accessibility

This site has been carefully designed to comply with the latest legislation, which is concerned to ensure the accessibility of websites to as wide an audience as possible. Several enhancements are available to you to help you use the site. For instance, it's possible to increase (or even decrease) the size of all the text on the pages. You can do this one of two ways - either by using the font size tool in the top right of each page's right column, or by using the font size controls integrated in your web browser.

Web browsers all do this differently, but in general you should look at the options in the browser's 'View' menu, failing which, consult your browser's Help documentation. Here are some specific instructions for some of the more popular browsers.

  • Internet Explorer (all Windows versions): Go to the 'View' menu, 'Text Size', and select your desired setting. The default is medium. Alternatively, if you have a mouse with a wheel you can hold the CTRL key on your keyboard whilst scrolling up or down with the wheel to alter the text size.
  • Internet Explorer 5.1 (Mac): Go to the View menu and use the 'Text Zoom' feature.
  • Apple Safari: Go the 'View' menu and use the 'Make Text Bigger' and 'Make Text Smaller' menu items. Alternatively you can use the option key with + or - to increase or decrease the text size.
  • Netscape 7 + (Mac and PC): Go to the 'View' menu and use the 'Text Zoom' feature to change text size. Alternatively you can use the CTRL key with the plus or minus to increase or decrease the size.
  • Mozilla (i.e. Firebird / Firefox / Camino, Mac and PC): Go to the 'View' menu and either click the 'Increase Text Size' or 'Decrease Text Size' menu items, or alternatively you can use the CTRL key with the plus or minus to increase or decrease the size.

Standards
This site fully complies with the latest web standards:

Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional

Valid CSS!

Browsers
In order to provide good accessiblity some compromises have unfortunately had to be made in terms of full support for certain older browsers which do not support web standards, or support them unreliably or unpredictably. We strongly recommend that you use only the following browsers:  Windows:

  • Internet Explorer 6 - available at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/default.asp. Many people have this on their Windows-based PCs already. If you don't have Internet Explorer, or if you have a version earlier than version 6, you should consider obtaining one of the Mozilla browsers (see below) instead, because they are small and quick to download.
  • Mozilla, Mozilla Firefox - all available at http://www.mozilla.org/
  • Netscape 7 or 8 (in Internet Explorer or Firefox rendering mode)
  • Opera 8 or above

Apple Mac:

Linux:

The following browsers are not recommended on any platform - they will show the website but may not display the pages optimally:

  • Opera (Mac or PC, any version before 7)
  • Netscape (Mac or PC, any version before 7)
  • Konqueror (Linux, any version)

We appreciate that it might not seem easy or desirable to have constantly to upgrade your browser! If you do have an older browser, or one not on the list above, and you are unable or unwilling to change it, rest assured you will still be able to use the site, but you will not have the best viewing experience. Additionally most accessibility enhancements will not be available to you. Netscape 4 users may only view the site in text-only mode. We therefore again strongly recommend you upgrade your browser. If you'd like to read more about why this is a good idea more generally, visit the Web Standards Project.