Accessibility

The Disability Discrimination Act 1995 requires that individuals with disabilities, who are members of the public seeking information or services from us, have access to and use of information and data that is comparable to that provided to the public who are not individuals with disabilities, unless an undue burden would be imposed on us.

To help us ensure that our website complies, we have built the site to several international standards. These include:

Validated XHTML

This ensures that the code that we have used on this site validates against the W3C’s gold standard. As more and more assistive technology (such as a Braille reader, a screen reader, TTY, etc.) is using this standard to build against, we can be sure of making our site accessible to the widest audience.

Validated CSS

Again, by validating our style sheets against the W3C gold standard, we can make our site accessible to everybody with a compliant browser or other assistive technology.

W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines

The easiest way to validate our pages against this standard is via “Bobby.” This service allows us to test web pages and help expose and repair barriers to accessibility and encourage compliance with existing accessibility standards, such as Section 508 of the US Disablities Act and the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

If you use assistive technology and the format of any material on our web sites interferes with your ability to access the information, please contact us for assistance. To enable us to respond in a manner most helpful to you, please indicate the nature of your accessibility problem, the preferred format in which to receive the material, the web address of the requested material, and your contact information.

Accessibility Features in your Browser

Most browsers and screens can be adjusted to help you view websites more clearly and this can be done by altering the size, format and colours.

Internet Explorer

Go to Tools/Internet Options and under the General Tab select Colours, Fonts or Accessibility. You can also press the F1 Key for further information on accessibility features within Explorer.

Firefox

Go to Edit/Preferences and under the Content Tab you can select the fonts and colours that you prefer to be used as the default for the browser.