Accessibility
Functionality and accessibility are core to our online best practice, we programme for the widest audience meeting DDA and W3C standards to priority 1 and 2 rating and priority 3 where possible. All sites are tested on both PC and MAC platforms with using an "Elegant Degradation" methodology - additional best practice standards below:
Platforms: PC Windows (98, NT ,2K, XP) Apple Mac (OS9, OSX)
Resolution: 1024x768 viewable
Browsers Tested: IE7-9,Chrome, Firefox3-5 / MAC - Safari, ipad, iphone
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS): Pages viewable without images (i.e. Lynx browsers)
Images: Wherever information is presented using images, matching alternative text is provided
JavaScript: Detection with automatic alternative non-JavaScript content replacement
Code validation: XHTML 1.0 Transitional
Navigation aids
All pages have relative home links to aid navigation in text-only browsers. Users can also take advantage of this feature by selecting the View menu, Show/Hide, Site Navigation Bar, Show Only As Needed (or Show Always).
Links
Many links have title attributes which describe the link in greater detail, unless the text of the link already fully describes the target (such as the headline of an article). Links are written to make sense out of context.
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 aids
This site uses cascading style sheets for visual layout. This site uses relative font sizes, compatible with the user-specified "text size" option in visual browsers If your browser or browsing device does not support stylesheets at all, the content of each page is still readable.
Accessibility references websites
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.
Standards compliance
All pages on this site complying with priority 1 and 2 guidelines of the W3C Web Content Accessibility 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. For example, on this page, JAWS users can skip to the next section within the accessibility statement by pressing ALT+INSERT+2.
