Accessibility Statement

Access keys & other navigational aids

This site does not use the accesskey attribute by default. This is because access keys are known to clash with other assistive technology and can often cause more harm than good. However, the site does have numerous skip navigation links that will let you jump to the site navigation, main content and footer links respectively. These links were built using the skip navigation builder tool which you can also use for the same purpose.

All other navigation is based on unordered lists, each list preceded by a suitable heading. This enables users with assistive tech to jump from navigation block, regardless of the skip navigation links that have been provided.

Standards Compliance

All pages are built to comply with the following standards (or recommendations):

HTML 4.01 Strict
WCAG 1.0 Priority Level 2 (many pages will also pass Level 3)

Previously, the site was built to XHTML standard, but this offered little in the way of benefits (as pages were never served with the correct MIME-type), so it was put back to HTML 4.01 in the 2008 redesign. And why not?

If you discover any problems with this web site, please report the problem and someone will fix it.

Images

All images used on this web site have suitable alt attributes (or empty alt attributes for purely decorative items). If you spot some that are not correct, please let us know.

Use of scripts

JavaScript is kept to a bare minimum on this site, and no content section should be unusable if JavaScript is not enabled or not supported in your web browser. We use jQuery for visual effects and to plug holes in some browsers' inability to do things such as changing styles on links when tabbed to rather than just being moused over.

The Tools & Wizards section does make fairly extensive use of JavaScript in some of the code-generating tools and these are definitely not going to work when scripting is disabled. The assumption is that the visitors to this site are, primarily, people who care about building accessible sites and these tools are there to help them achieve this aim, as opposed to visitors coming to this site because they have certain needs themselves.