We are committed to ensuring that our website is accessible to everyone. If you have any questions or suggestions regarding the accessibility of this site, please use our contact form, as we are continually striving to improve the experience for all of our visitors.

Standards compliance

We aim to ensure that:

  1. All pages on this site follow priorities 1 & 2 guidelines of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
  2. All pages on this site validate as HTML 5.
  3. All pages on this site use structured semantic markup.

Structural Markup

Web pages on this site include 3 different areas:

  1. A header bar that includes the main navigation,
  2. A main content area,
  3. A footer.

When CSS (Cascading Styles Sheet) are not applied to a document (or when using a screen reader), the 3 areas are read in the above order.

Access Keys

Unfortunately, access keys often clash with keys set aside for use with other UAs (i.e. assistive technology). For this reason, we have decided to not set default access keys, but rather let you set your own.

Images

  1. Unless they are purely decorative items, all images used on this web site should have suitable alt attributes.
  2. Content should be usable/accessible with images “off” (disabled).
  3. The main navigation bar on this site uses an Image Replacement technique that makes the links accessible to non-visual browsers.

Links

  1. Many links have title attributes which describe the link in greater detail, unless the text of the link already fully describes the target.
  2. Links are written to make sense out of context.
  3. URLs are permanent whenever possible.

Forms

  1. All form controls are appropriately and explicitly labeled.
  2. We provide an email address as an alternative form of access for our online forms.
  3. Form validation routine does not rely on client-side script.

Scripts

  1. We are using non obtrusive client-side scripts.
  2. Content of this web site is usable without JavaScript support.

Visual design

  1. This site uses cascading style sheets for visual layout.
  2. This site uses only relative font sizes, compatible with the user-specified “text size” option in visual browsers.
  3. If your browser or browsing device does not support stylesheets at all, the content of each page is still readable.
  4. Any information conveyed through the use of color is also available without color (i.e. text based).

How to modify this site to fit your needs

These links explain the many ways you can make the web more accessible to you.