Accessibility
What is 'accessibility' and why is it important?
Accessibility is about making your website available and understandable for everyone, including users with disabilities. W3 explains it in a great way at the Web Accessibility Initiative.
The template allows browser-based font resizing, making sure that site visitors can enlarge the font size.
We believe that it is important to make our website accessible to all potential users. With this in mind we have worked hard to improve the website for people with all disabilities and impairments. We have ensured the availability of "alt text", a simple and clear approach to online layout and colour contrast.
Our site works well in text-only browsers and fits the criteria for people with visual impairment. Additionally, great care is taken when designing new pages to ensure that navigation is simple, links are accurate and images are clear. We try to ensure that articles on the site are written in plain English in order that people of all ages and abilities can easily read the content.
This site uses only relative font sizes, compatible with the user-specified "text size" option in visual browsers. If your browser or browsing device does not support style sheets at all, the content of each page is still readable.
It is structured with valid XHTML 1.1 transitionsal and semantic markup. Cascading style sheets are used for visual layout. Both are validated as by the W3C Markup Validation Services.
All pages are WCAG A approved, complying with all priority 1 and most of priority 2 and 3 guidelines of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. This is a judgemental call; many guidelines are intentionally vague and can not be tested automatically. We hope that this makes the site accessible to as many users as possible but we recognise the need to continue to improve.