Help & Accessibility Information
- About this website
- Accessibility statement
- Making the most of our site accessibility features
- Standards compliance
About this website
The website has four main areas:
The header contains the title of the page with the organisation logo and accessibility links.
The left hand side column contains the main menu.
The middle and right hand side columns (as appropriate) contain the content area of the site and consist of the main content or information for the page. They may, in addition, contain links to other pages within the web site, or to external websites.
The footer, at the bottom of the page, contains copyright information and key navigation links. If the page contains a lot of text then users don't have to scroll back to the top of the page to find these links.
Accessibility information
The following sections describe some of the features that have been incorporated into this website to aid accessibility.
Accessibility Statement
We are committed to ensuring accessibility of this website for people with disabilities. Where possible, all web content will conform to W3C/WAI's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
Making the most of our site accessibility features
Please refer to our information below on specific accessibility features. For more help on how to get the best from your own software please consult the relevant application help files.
Is the text on your screen too large? Or too small?
You may find that on your screen, the text on this web site is either too large or too small for your personal needs. Using the options below you can set a smaller or larger standard font size, and this will be applied to all pages you visit on our website (and many others on the Internet).
The technique for changing the text size is slightly different depending on the browser that you use. Some common examples are:
- Internet Explorer Select the 'View' menu (at the top of the screen), and select one of the options under 'Text Size'. The default setting is Medium.
- Mozilla Firefox Select the 'View' menu, then select Increase, Decrease or Normal.
- Opera Select the 'View' menu, then one of the 'Zoom' percentage options.
- Netscape Select the 'View' menu, then one of the 'Text Size' or 'Text Zoom' options.
Other browsers may also have similar options available. Please consult the help files provided with your browser if similar options to the ones above aren't available.
Access keys
Most browsers support jumping to specific links by typing certain keys defined on the web site.
Pages on this site define the following access keys:
- Access key 0 - Help and Accessibility Information (this page)
- Access key 1 - Home page
- Access key 2 - Skip to Main Navigation
- Access key 8 - Disclaimer, Privacy and Policies
- Access key 9 - Contact Form
- Access key A - About us
- Access key C - Change contrast
- Access key D - Dragon Naturally Speaking product information
- Access key P - TalkingPoint product information
- Access key T - Top of page
- Access key S - Case Studies
| Browser | What to do |
|---|---|
| Internet Explorer 5+ (PC) | Hold down the ALT key, press the access key, release both keys then press ENTER |
| Internet Explorer 4 (PC) | Hold down the ALT key and press the access key |
| Internet Explorer 5+ (Mac) | Hold down the CTRL key and press the access key |
| Internet Explorer 4.5 (Mac) | Access keys are not supported |
| Netscape 6 and earlier (PC & Mac) | Access keys are not supported |
| Netscape 7 (PC) | Hold down the ALT key and press the access key |
| Firefox, Mozilla (PC) | Hold down the ALT key and press the access key |
| Firefox, Mozilla (Mac) | Hold down the CTRL key and press the access key |
| Safari, Omniweb (Mac) | Hold down the CTRL key and press the access key |
| Opera | Hold down the SHIFT key and press ESCAPE, release both keys, then press the access key |
Notes & feedback
Please note that some assistive technology tools such as the IBM HomePage Reader and WindowEyes already make use of the ALT+[access key] combinations. As such, users of these tools will not be able to use these access keys.
If you have any comments on how we could make better use of access keys on this site, please contact us with your feedback.
Tab indexing
The site is designed to make tabbing through a page easy. The order for tab indexing in a page is as follows:
- Accessibility links
- Main navigation links
- Main content links
- Sidebar links
- Footer navigation links
High contrast page setting
This site has the option 'Change contrast' at the top of the page, which increases the page contrast by switching the text to yellow and the background to black. This could help some people to better read the site's content. The page can easily be changed back to normal contrast by clicking again on the 'Change contrast' link.
Images
All content images used in this site include descriptive ALT attributes. Purely decorative graphics include null ALT attributes.
Visual design
This site uses cascading style sheets for visual layout.
This site uses only relative font sizes, compatible with the user-specified 'text size' option in visual browsers.
If your browser or browsing device does not support stylesheets at all, the content of each page is still readable.
Using assistive technology
Assistive technologies are products used by people with disabilities to help accomplish tasks that they cannot accomplish otherwise or could not do easily otherwise. When used with computers, assistive technologies are also referred to as adaptive software.
Some assistive technologies rely on output of other user agents, such as graphical desktop browsers, text browsers, voice browsers, multimedia players and plug-ins. Assistive technology comes in many different forms, some of these include:
- Alternative keyboards or switches
- Braille and refreshable Braille
- Screen magnifiers
- Sound notification
- Screen readers
- Speech recognition
- Scanning software
- Speech synthesis (speech output)
- Tabbing through structural elements
- Text browsers
As part of our accessibility statement we will test our pages against as many types of assistive technologies as we can to make the pages more accessible to you. If you do find that you are unable to access any information using any assistive technology then please contact us. If we cannot make the information accessible to you using your assistive technology, then we will try to find an alternative way for you to access or be provided with the information.
Standards compliance
Most pages on this site comply with all priority 1 guidelines of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
This site validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict.
The stylesheets on this site are CSS 2.
The following are conformance badges relating to the accessibility and technical standards of this website.
