Accessibility Policy

Browser compatibility

This site has been developed to work with all browsers on all platforms and be accessible to and usable by all visitors.

Changing font sizes in Internet Explorer and Firefox

There are several ways to change the font size of the displayed web page text in Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox web browsers.

Using Your Scroll Wheel:

Using the scroll wheel on the mouse is definitely quick and easy, especially when you don't want or don't like to tinker around with browser menu options or keyboard shortcuts.

Hit the Control key and keep it pressed. Now, move the scroll wheel and see what happens - scrolling the wheel away from your hand will decrease the font size while if you scroll it towards your hand, the font size will increase.

A few points to remember. Internet Explorer will let you resize the fonts to 5 sizes - Largest, Larger, Medium (the default), Smaller and Smallest. Firefox, however, has a wider range and lets you decrease the font size till it becomes illegible or enlarges it so much that you see only one word on the screen.

Through the View Menu:

Another way to change font sizes of text on web pages in Internet Explorer and Firefox is through the View menu.

In Internet Explorer, click on View from the top menu and move down to Text Size. You can now change the text to one of the five sizes - Largest, Larger, Medium, Smaller and Smallest. Internet Explorer lets you change the font size to only one of these five values.

You can also accomplish the same using keyboard shortcuts. ALT-V would bring up the View menu. Clicking on the "x" key would open the Text Size menu. You can now use the up and down arrow keys and finally click on "Enter" once you have made your selection.

In Firefox, from the View menu choose Text Size and then select whether you want to increase or decrease the font size.

The keyboard shortcuts for changing the font size of text on web pages in Firefox are much simpler than Internet Explorer. Keeping the CONTROL key pressed, click on the "+" key to increase the font size and "-" key to decrease the font size. I know I couldn't resist the temptation myself, but don't play around much with this feature else you can get a splitting headache. Since Firefox allows you to change text sizes across a wider range than Internet Explorer, I suggest you use the keyboard shortcuts on this browser.

Access keys

Access keys are keyboard shortcuts that replace the need to use the mouse for navigation, in browsers that support them. In Internet Explorer on Windows, you can press ALT + an access key; on Macintosh, you can press Control + an access key. Then press Enter to activate the link. Firefox 2.0 uses Shift+Alt as the keystroke combination to invoke access keys

The following access keys are available throughout the website

  • S skip navigation
  • 1 home page
  • 2 what's new page
  • 3 site map
  • 4 search facility on the site
  • 5 frequently asked questions (FAQ)
  • 6 help page/facility
  • 7 complaints procedure
  • 8 terms and conditions (including privacy statement)
  • 9 feedback page
  • 0 information about of accesskeys

These access keys have been chosen to follow the UK government e-envoy's guidelines where applicable, in order to support the adoption of a useful standard.

Images

All content images used in this site include descriptive alt attributes.

Visual design

This site uses cascading style sheets for visual layout. 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 stylesheets at all, the content of each page is still readable.  On no page is it essential to see text colour correctly, and effort has been taken to maintain high background-foreground contrast at all times.

Forms

All forms follow a logical Tab sequence. Labels are associated with fields using HTML label tags.

Links

Many links have title attributes which describe the link in greater detail, unless the text of the link already fully describes the target.

Whenver possible, links are written to make sense out of context. Many browsers (such as JAWS, Home Page Reader, Lynx, and Opera) can extract the list of links on a page and allow the user to browse the list, separately from the page.

Standards Compliance

Where possible all pages are intended to comply with all priority 1, 2, and 3 guidelines of the W3 Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

  • All pages validate as XHTML 1.0
  • All pages use structured semantic markup

How to Report Accessibility Problems

If you come across any access barriers with our site, please let us know and we will do our best to fix them. You can e-mail us at our contact page.