Accessibility

In designing this website we have striven to ensure that it is equally accessible to everyone. Particular care has been taken to make sure it can be viewed using screen reading software, and that HTML5 semantic tags have been used in the layout of our web pages, to help signpost the meaning or purpose of sections of our pages, which is supported in the newest browsers.

There are guidelines which set out how to make website content more accessible for people with disabilities. Following these guidelines will help to make a website more user-friendly for all people, and not just those with disabilities. For more information on these guidelines, please follow the links below:

We believe our site exceeds WAI ‘A’ compliance and is near ‘AA’ standard.

We adopt a policy of continual improvement and we aim to improve the accessibility of our site whenever possible. Please let us know if you experience any difficulties accessing any area of our site, and we will aim to address any issues within our future developments of the website. Our aim is to achieve compliance with the ‘AAA’ standard of the W3C Web Content Accessibility guidelines ultimately.

While we do our very best to comply with the guidelines, please note that it is not always possible to do so in all areas of the website. Where we have not been able to comply, we aim to provide compliant content in other areas so that everyone can access details of our work and achievements.

Site Design

This site has been written using W3C standards compliant code for HTML and CSS. The site displays correctly in current browsers and by using standards-compliant HTML/CSS code means any future browsers will also display it correctly. Where we have taken advantage of the latest HTML5 and CSS3 features, we have tried to ensure these degrade gracefully for those using older browsers that do not support these features, so that everyone can have a good, if not always identical, viewing experience.

The website has been designed using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) which ensures that the design is kept separate from the content. It is therefore possible to easily read the pages in browsers that don’t support CSS or if CSS support is turned off in the browser.

Control over the size of the page and text is available through the browser’s Zoom options:

Windows / Internet Explorer 8 and above, and all other browsers

Hold down the CTRL key, then press + to increase the font size, or press  to decrease the font size.

Mac OS / all browsers

Hold down the CMD key, then press + to increase the font size, or press  to decrease the font size.

Our site has been designed using ‘responsive’ technology, to ensure that the content is best displayed depending on the size of the screen it is being viewed upon.

Page Layout and Content

The content has been written and formatted to make it accessible.

For example:

  • Headings signpost sections of text
  • We have kept sentences short
  • Links use meaningful text, and we have set the title attribute to a relevant descriptive name
  • Forms can be navigated using the tab key

We now include audio/video files on some of our pages, for those that are able to enjoy these. We have made sure that our site does not rely on these and traditional text-based content is available elsewhere to fully describe our work. This is to ensure that we do not to discriminate against people with hearing or vision impairment.

Some files on this website are PDF files to be viewed using Adobe Acrobat Reader software, which is freely available to download. Where possible, text only versions are also available on the site. Hard copies of these files are available upon request, if you are unable to download these.

We have no control over, and can take no responsibility for, the accessibility of external sites to which we provide links.

If you experience any problems viewing pages, please contact us.