When creating this website, we applied standard-compliant technologies to make sure that the information is accessible.
This site uses many features to make information more accessible:
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) – along with other groups and standards bodies – has established technologies for creating and interpreting web-based content. These technologies, called ‘web standards’, are carefully designed to make sure that as many web users as possible can benefit from a website. They also ensure that documents published on the web can be accessed and used for a long time.
This site uses Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) which determine the style and presentation of the information on the site such as fonts, colours, margins and borders. CSS allow the content to be separated from design which is a helpful tool when new content is added.
You can, however, view the pages on this site without stylesheets. Disabling stylesheets will only affect the design and presentation of content – no actual information will be lost.
xHTML combines the more powerful and versatile XML with the familiar web language of HTML. xHTML is designed to allow richer web pages to display on various browser platforms, including mobile phones, PDAs and TVs.
The xHTML tags used on this site also provide additional information about structural items – for example, summary descriptions of tables, explanations of hierarchy within tables, emphasis on certain words and phrases, explanation of abbreviations and structure of forms. These tags are often hidden in visual browsers but provide valuable information to non-visual browsers.
Parts of this site use JavaScript to improve site design, enable user–interaction and validate forms. Wherever JavaScript is used, it has been carefully considered and implemented so that it does not affect the accessibility. In particular, we have worked to:
Metadata has been added to all pages to provide important orientation information to users.
The metadata provided includes:
We have applied a consistent navigation structure on all pages of this site. Use the navigation bar to see which section of the site you are currently viewing. The page you are on will be clearly highlighted in the navigation bar.
Many of the links on this site have title attributes – these describe the link in greater detail. Title attributes are applied to all links except those where the text of the link already fully describes the target – such as the headline of an article or name of a person.
Most browsers display the title attribute when your mouse hovers over the link. Some screenreaders may also pick up this information.
All links are also worded to make sense even when taken out of context.
Most navigation elements used on this site are displayed in plain text. Whenever graphics are used, we have provided text alternatives.
If you would like to increase the size of the text, go to ‘View’ in the browser’s main menu, and select the option ‘Text zoom’, ‘Text magnification’, ‘Text size’ or ‘Font size’. This option will display a sub-menu option that lets you adjust the text size.
The site uses colours that provide enough contrast for users who are colour blind.
The images on this site have been carefully considered, and use text alternates to enhance accessibility.
Many of the lists used within this site have title attributes – these describe the content of the list in greater detail. Text that follows a logical and structured order is marked up as a list.
To get the best experience of this site and take full advantage of its features, we suggest you use a standards-compliant browser that supports numerous web standards including CSS, xHTML and the DOM (a universal means of controlling the behaviour of web pages). These are our recommended browsers:
This site was designed to take full advantage of version 6+ browsers. You can still view the site on a version 4 browser without losing any information, but the design might look different because older browsers don’t support Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) fully.
This website has been tested with the following browsers.
| Browser | Version | OS | Version |
|---|---|---|---|
| Internet Explorer | 7.0 | Windows XP | 5.1 |
| Internet Explorer | 6.0 | Windows XP | 5.1 |
| Mozilla Camino | 2006021400 (1.0) | OS X | 10.4.8 |
| Mozilla Firefox | 3.5 | OS X | 10.5.7 |
| Mozilla Firefox | 2.0 | OS X | 10.4.8 |
| Mozilla Firefox | 1.5.0.1 | OS X | 10.4.8 |
| Mozilla Netscape | 7.1 | OS X | 10.4.8 |
| OmniWeb | 4.5 | OS X | 10.4.8 |
| Opera | 9.0 | OS X | 10.4.8 |
| Safari | 4 | OS X | 10.5.7 |
| Safari | 2.0.3 | OS X | 10.4.8 |
Please note that there are variations in performance or visual styling between different browsers that depend on the operating system and the browser’s support for CSS.
We have made sure that this website is as bandwidth-friendly as possible. However, we recommend that you access this site with a fast connection to the internet (for example DSL, ISDN, Cable, T-1) and a computer operating at 500MHz or faster.