Accessibility

This website is designed to be meet W3C guidelines (ie Web Accessibilty Initiative - WAI) and industry best practices to produce an accessible website. The aim is to cater for the widest possible audience including people who are vision impaired, have hearing, physical, cognitive and neurological disabilities (read more). This is an on-going activity to improve and enhance this website. If you have any questions or comments about the accessibility of this site, please get in touch via the contacts page. This website also makes use of a small amount of javascript. If you have disabled javascript, it will have little impact on userability. The website has been tested with Internet Explorer 6.0, Firefox 5.0 and Opera 9.10. For best results, a screen resolution of 1024 by 768 is recommended.

Access Keys

Access Keys Access keys are keyboard shortcuts that replace the need to use a mouse for navigation. For this site, you can use the following keys:

1 for Home page
2 to Skip navigation
3 for Services
4 for Client Area
5 for Sitemap
6 for Accessibility
7 for Contact Us
8 for Privacy
9 for Legal
0 for Downloads

You may also use the TAB key to jump from link to link and press the ENTER key to activate them.

To use the hot/access keys, for Windows:
Browser
Internet Explorer : ALT + access key + ENTER
Mozilla/Firefox : ALT + access key
Netscape/Gecko : ALT + access key
Opera : SHIFT + ESC + [release] + access key

For Macintosh:
Browser
Internet Explorer : CTRL + access key + RETURN
Mozilla/Firefox : CTRL + access key
Netscape/Gecko : CTRL + access key
Opera : SHIFT + ESC + [release] + access key

On Linux platform:
Browser
Mozilla/Firefox : ALT + access key
Netscape/Gecko : ALT + access key
Opera : SHIFT + ESC + [release] + access key

Text

The text on this website can be altered if required. This can be achieved by adjusting your browser settings. The following indicates the required navigation links :-

Internet Explorer 5, 5.5, 6 (PC) : View->Text Size
Firefox, Netscape 8 : View->Text Size
Opera : View->Zoom or Tools->Preferances->Advanced Tab->Select Font (left hand side)
Netscape 6, 7, Mozilla : View -> Text zoom
Safari (Mac) : View -> Make text bigger
Internet Explorer 5 (Mac) : View -> Text zoom

Changing colours

Users may wish to change the background colour further or change the colour of body text on the site. Both can be achieved by changing preferences in your browser.Depending on your browser type use one of the following

Internet Explorer : Tools -> Internet Options -> Colours
Netscape Navigator : Edit -> Preferences -> Appearance -> Colours

Navigation

The site page widths have been designed to ensure page widths can be used without using horizontal scroll bars. For navigation, a side menu is used as well a footer menu. In addition, a breadcrumb trail is displayed just below the page header.

Standards Compliance

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international consortium which aims to lead the Web to its full potential to make human communication, commerce and opportunities to share knowledge available to all people no matter what hardware, software, network infrastructure, physical or mental ability. The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) used in this web site were validated by the W3C. All pages were also validated as XHTML 1.0 Strict. These validations ensure the pages’ readability and presentation across different browsers.

Images

All images have short descriptions. These are called descriptive ALT tags These are set to NULL if appropriate. Images sizes have been optimised for the web. No flash animations are used on this website.

Visual Design

This site uses cascading style sheets for visual layout. If turned off or your browser/browsing device does not support styles sheets, the site can still be navigated and the contents of each page is still readable.

This site has also been tested on a number of browsers including Internet Explorer 6.0, Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.1, Opera 8.53 to ensure a consitent layout and appearance is produced.

Also, website page sizes have been optimised to ensure effiecient page loading even on slow connections. - Website colours have been tested to ensure that contrast levels, shades etc can be viewed clearly including by users with visual impairements such as colour blindness.

Screen Readers

Many links have title attributes. This makes the site easier to navigate and the information easier to find.

To help the users who extract a list of all the links on the page and browse it separately from the content, links were written to make sense out of context. Browsers such as JAWS, Home Page Reader, Lynx and Opera have this function.

Link text is always unique. Two links with the same link text always point to the same address.

Accessibility Software

Mozilla Firefox, this is an award winning web browser with many accessibility features, Also like opera is more web standards compliant than Internet Explorer. Some of the nice features are numerous useful plugins, customisable browser skins etc. Also, it also has less known security vulnerabilities then Internet Explorer.
Opera, a downloadable visual browser with accessibility features such as text zooming, user style sheets and image toggle. This is compatible with Windows, Macintosh, and Linux operating systems, among others.
Links, a free, text-only web browser for visual users with low bandwidth.
Lynx, a free text-only web browser for the blind with refreshable Braille displays.
Home Page Reader, a time-limited downloadable screen reader.
JAWS, a time-limited downloadable screen reader.

Accessibility Services

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
Watchfire, a free service that checks the compliance of web pages to accessibility guidelines.
HTML Validator, a free service that checks the conformance of web pages to published HTML standards.
Lynx viewer, a service that shows the views of web pages in Lynx.

Related Resources

Section 508 requires that Federal agencies' electronic and information technology is accessible to people with disabilities.
WebAIM, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving accessibility to online learning materials.
(Read more) on the reasons why accessibility is important.

If you have suggestions, improvements etc about this website please contact us via the (contact page).