How this site works

Accessibility options

We have done various things to make this site accessible, but you can customise it to make it work for you..

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0

These web pages conform to AA guidelines of WCAG 2.0 an accessibility specification published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Resize text

These web pages have been designed to allow you to resize the text using your browser. The Web Guide tells you how to resize text when pages have been designed in this way.

Screen reader compatibility

This website works with screen readers which can read and recognise links, tables, header, lists and forms.

Images

Images use either alternative text or captions to describe their meaning to screen readers. Purely decorative images without any meaning are ignored by screen readers.

Printing

Web pages sent to print are formatted appropriately. Areas of the page which are not useful in print, such as navigation, are removed. If you prefer a different style you could select and copy the text, paste it into a word-processing application, change the style and print it.

How we built this site

Code specifications

The hypertext markup language (HTML) used to structure web pages complies with XHTML 1.0 strict specifications. The cascading style sheets (CSS) used to style web pages comply with CSS 2.1 specifications.

These web pages will look consistent and work in a similar way across a wide range of browsers and devices, now and in the future.

Customisable design

CSS provides the default design for web pages including text size, colour, images and layout. Customise this site allows you to adjust the design easily according to your preferences.

Navigation

Navigation menus are styled consistently to improve usability. These include

• ‘Skip to content’ link providing quick access to web page content for screen readers and keyboard users, by bypassing navigation menus
• group of links to the sitemap, A-Z and search, at the top right of every web page
• group of links to section pages and the top-level section page, on the right side of every web page. The current page title is highlighted to reflect your current location
• links to subpages in the right side navigation, where relevant
• icons to help identify warnings, actions, site features and document types such as Portable Document File (PDF)
• group of links at the bottom of every web page providing access to Back to top, Customise this site, Print this page, Site feedback, How this site works

Video and audio

We use the National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) player to display video and audio content.

The video player has synchronised captions, keyboard access, full screen rendering and keyword search.

The audio player has synchronised captions and keyword search.

Full transcripts are always available to screen readers.

Javascript

The content of web pages is available and accessible by all browsers and devices regardless of support for Javascript. Javascript is used to improve the look of web pages or provide non-essential additional functionality.