Website accessibility
What and why?
Our site is designed to maximise accessibility for those with sight problems or who are using assistive technologies such as screen readers. Page elements are laid out logically – tables display tabular data, lists are displayed within the relevant tags etc..
Other techniques, which are invisible to most users using visual browsers, are employed to further enhance accessibility, such as options to skip navigation, giving images and other elements “ALT” descriptions.
An example - "Skip Navigation" - Users of non-visual browsers can jump straight to the central content the page by clicking the skip navigation link at the top of each page, or by using an AccessKey. This skip navigation link is hidden to modern browsers through CSS but will be the first link for a user of a screen reader so they can avoid all menus etc., and go directly to the content of the page.
CSS?
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) are used to separate design from content, enabling content to be fully accessible to screen readers, and allowing techniques such as pure CSS rollover menu buttons with no restrictive graphical elements.
CSS separates content from presentation, so information is always conveyed to the browser as plain text, as opposed to in image form, which is inaccessible to anyone using a non-visual browser. In plain english this means the site looks like any other on a normal computer, but time and care has been taken to ensure that "under the hood" the site makes sense to all visitors, regardless of ability.
