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Accessibility

We have tried to make this web content as accessible as possible by adopting the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 as the standard of accessibility. All pages on this site should comply with these guidelines and the site is accessible to screen readers, PDA's, moble phones and PC's. It has been tested against the following browsers (and versions): Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Netscape.

Web standards

We have also built the site to comply with web standards, in particular XHTML 1.0 Transitional and CSS 2.0.

We've done this in order to separate the content from its presentation, making the site work on as wide a variety of browsers and platforms as possible.

• Find out more about web standards
• Check the validity of the XHTML on this page
• Check the validity of the CSS on this page

Standards compliance

• The pages on this site have been designed to be Bobby AAA approved, complying with all the Bobby guidelines.
• All pages on this site is WCAG AAA approved, complying wih all priority 1, 2, and 3 guidelines of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Again, this is a judgement call; many guidelines are intentionally vague and can not be tested automatically.
• The pages on this site are Section 508 approved, complying with all of the U.S. Federal Government Section 508 Guidelines.
• All pages on this site validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional
• All pages on this site use structured semantic markup. H1 tags are used for main titles, H2 tags for subtitles.

Images

• All content images used in this site include descriptive ALT attributes. Purely decorative graphics include null ALT attributes.
• Complex images include LONGDESC attributes or inline descriptions to explain the significance of each image to non-visual readers.

Visual design

• This site uses cascading style sheets for visual layout.
• If your browser or browsing device does not support stylesheets at all, the content of each page is still readable.

Accessibility references

• W3 accessibility guidelines, which explains the reasons behind each guideline.
• W3 accessibility techniques, which explains how to implement each guideline.
• W3 accessibility checklist, a busy developer's guide to accessibility.
• U.S. Federal Government Section 508 accessibility guidelines.

Accessibility software

• JAWS, a screen reader for Windows. A time-limited, downloadable demo is available.
• Home Page Reader, a screen reader for Windows. A downloadable demo is available.
• Lynx, a free text-only web browser for blind users with refreshable Braille displays.
• Links, a free text-only web browser for visual users with low bandwidth.
• Opera, a visual browser with many accessibility-related features, including text zooming, user stylesheets, image toggle. A free downloadable version is available. Compatible with Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and several other operating systems.

Accessibility services

• Bobby, a free service to analyze web pages for compliance to accessibility guidelines. A full-featured commercial version is also available.
• HTML Validator, a free service for checking that web pages conform to published HTML standards.
• Web Page Backward Compatibility Viewer, a tool for viewing your web pages without a variety of modern browser features.
• Lynx Viewer, a free service for viewing what your web pages would look like in Lynx.

Related resources

• WebAIM, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving accessibility to online learning materials.
• Designing More Usable Web Sites, a large list of additional resources.

Problems using the site

If you are experiencing any problems with the accessibility of this site relating to a particular platform, or if you use Adaptive Technology and have any suggestions about how we might make the site easier for you to use, please contact us .