Accessibility

Please see below for our efforts to ensure our website is Accessibility compliant, as it is important to us to offer each and every one of our customers a rewarding experience when visiting our website.  If you have any trouble at all accessing our website or have any suggestions on this matter so we may improve our website please do not hesitate to contact us.

Please also note that we include a complete sitemap of our website contents here.

Cross browser compatibility

Our website has been tested for compatibility on both Windows and Macintosh platforms, and is compliant with the following browsers : Internet Explorer 6.0+, Mozilla Firefox 1.0+, Opera 9.x and Netscape Navigator 9.x.

Although some of the above mentioned browsers may display things slightly differently from one another, these changes are merely cosmetic and will not hinder the usability in any way.

Accessibility Laws

Our website has been tested against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and we are confident that it meets at least the minimum requirements (Priority 1) as well as the majority of Priority 2 & 3.

Scripts and Plugins

The use of client-side scripts in this site (e.g. Javascript) has been kept to an absolute minimum, therefore any users who have scripting capabilities disabled will still be able to access our website without any problems whatsoever.

Images

All images used on this site have ALT tags in order to provide an appropriate description of the image (or function behind it, in the case of images used as links), again, for those visitors with visibility difficulties or have graphics switched off on their browsers.

Page Layouts, Text and other Styles

The overall layout for pages on this site is created in valid XHTML and uses DIVs rather that tables to control positioning of elements.

External CSS stylesheets are used to control the overall layout of the page and the text styles throughout, including colouring and positioning. If stylesheets are disabled in the browser, pages are still readable and fully functional.

All pages are 'in-line', no 'pop-up' windows are ever spawned, and any further windows are only opened on user request.

No information is exclusively conveyed using colour.

Our pages are designed so that they are without horizontal scrollbars when they are viewed at a screen resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels or higher.

Downloading PDF Documents

Adobe Acrobat is required to view and print PDF documents that appear on this website. To download this programme for free, visit the Adobe website. To read PDF documents with a screen reader please link to the Access Adobe website which provides useful tools and resources. Adobe also has a free online conversion tool for pdfs.

Using the website without a mouse

Mouseless visitors will find that they can navigate between pages by using the TAB key on their keyboard.

Specific tab indexing has been employed (where necessary) on all pages in order to provide a logical route through the menu links. Menu links can be followed by hitting the ENTER key on the keyboard.

Additionally, 'access keys' have been assigned to important sections of the site. These keys (supported by most modern browsers) provide quick access to important areas.

To access any of these specific pages, visitors with Windows-based browsers (such as later versions of Internet Explorer for Windows) should be able to hit the relevant letter or number (as indicated below) on their keyboard whilst holding down their ALT key (in some cases, this action may have to be followed by the ENTER key). Macintosh users should find that holding down the CONTROL key on their keyboards whilst pressing one of the access keys listed below will produce the same effect.