• Logo
  • Logo
  • Logo
  • Home
  • >
  • Accessibility

Accessibility

Making our websites easy to use is really important to us. We are constantly looking at ways to improve accessibility.

The things we have done to improve accessibility

Text size – most modern browsers allow users to change the default text size of pages. Users of Internet Explorer can go to View > Text Size in the browser menu and choose increase or decrease the text size across the site.

Useful forms – this site features a number of useful forms. These forms allow you to use the TAB key on your keyboard to navigate in a logical order from field to field, as well as allowing you to click the label if you have problems selecting smaller form elements like checkboxes with a mouse or other device.

Living up to standards

We aim to meet W3C standards to improve the accessibility of the site. W3C - or the World Wide Web Consortium - is an international body established to develop interoperable technologies for the web.

We take accessibility seriously and know that simply adhering to standards is only part of the solution. We are ultimately looking to provide you with the best possible service, and this will involve us keeping abreast of the published standards and legal requirements, as well as your real accessibility needs.

Standards we adhere to include:

XHTML – the language used to create web pages on the Internet. This is an XML (eXtensible Mark-up Language) compliant reworking of HTML (Hypertext Mark-up Language).

CSS – this stands for cascading style sheets and is a language which allows presentation styles to be attached to structured HTML and XHTML documents.

WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) version 1 – this was published in 1999 and provides three levels of guidelines for assisting in building accessible website. Eventually we aim to meet at least the second level guidelines across all of our sites. We are also monitoring the development of the new draft of the guidelines (WCAG 2) as well as proposed errata for WCAG 1.

Browser support

We recommend viewing and accessing the website using the following supported browsers:

If you experience any problems accessing the website, it is recommended that the browser version is checked against the list above and appropriate updates are run to reflect the browsers supported.

Supporting our communities for 750 years