Accessibility
This web site follows the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative's (WAI) Guidelines.
Text size
The text size used throughout the site is easily increased or decreased using the buttons within the Accessibility Options area of the page.
This website is now speech-enabled
This website is now speech-enabled, which means that you can download free software onto your personal computer and have the site read aloud to you. Click on the image below for details.
Changing colours
Changing the site's background colour can be particularly useful for users who rely on magnification technology as white can produce an uncomfortable glare. It is also possible to change the colour of body text on the site. Both can be achieved by changing preferences in your browser:
- If you use Microsoft Internet Explorer, go to the "Tools" menu, select "Internet Options", select "Colors" and make changes to text and background colours in the Colors panel. Then choose the "Accessibility" button and tick the box labelled "Ignore colours specified on Web".
- If you use Netscape Navigator, go to the "Edit" menu, select "Preferences", open the "Appearance" menu and select "Colors". You can set the colour of text and background from here.
Access Keys
This website includes integrated keyboard shortcuts, known as Access Keys, to allow quick access to pages and provide quick and easy navigation for users without a mouse.
The keyboard shortcuts can be used from any page in the site and are listed below:
1 = Home
A = Accessibility Page
To use these access keys follow the instructions below:
Microsoft Internet Explorer - press 'Alt' and letter, then press enter.
Netscape - press 'Alt' and letter at the same time
Firefox - press 'Alt' and letter at the same time
Apple Mac's - press 'CTRL' and letter at the same time
Viewing PDFs (Portable Document Format)
Most of the documents on our website are in PDF format which means they can only be viewed using Adobe Reader. This software is available free of charge from the Adobe Web site
All PDF documents on this site will open in a new Web browser window. After viewing or printing the document, you can close the new Web browser window by using the close button at the top right hand corner.
Adobe also offer other useful resources and tools to aid the accessibility of PDFs, these can be accessed via the Access Adobe website, and include a text-only Adobe Reader download page and an online conversion tool for PDFs.
Listening to PDFs - Read Out Loud
The latest version of Adobe Reader, version 7, comes with the ability to "read" the PDF content to you. This function known as "Read Out Loud" can be accessed as follows:
With the PDF you want read to you open in Adobe Reader 7, go to the "View" menu and select "Read Out Loud", you will then have the option to "Read This Page Only" or "Read To End Of Document".
