Accessibility: make our website look the way you want

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Help in making our website look the way you want

This website was created by TVS Media and Dollond & Aitchison and has been developed with accessibility in mind. Users with stylesheets enabled are able to change the colours, font size and style of our website to one of two high-contrast themes.

Accessibility features

We offer the following accessibility features on our site:

• Skip to content, menu and top of page links to help screen readers access content quickly.
• A search facility and sitemap to find content quickly.
• Clear logical navigation.
• CSS to separate style from content so that the same content is available to ALL viewers regardless of how the content is accessed.
• High-contrast alternative stylesheets (viewing themes) designed to assist reading for visitors with poor eyesight.
• Sizable text for comfortable reading.
• Standards compliant, valid, semantic markup to ensure compatability across many browsers, screen readers, alternative media-types and assitance software.

Alternative CSS Themes

Fig1. Illustration of the font size and colour scheme options

We have developed high-contrast themes for users with impaired vision. Users can set their prefered font size and theme using the function at the bottom of every page.

We use proportional font sizes so that text-sizes can easily be increased or decreased in your browser and wont break the flow of the page.

Accessibility and usability of our site

Our website strives to uphold the principles and best practice of the WCAG 1.0 AAA guidelines. While we aim to comply with the WCAG guidelines, we recognise that web technology has moved on since their creation, and a number of them are less applicable than at their time of publication. Our central objective is users finding our site accessible and usable in practice. Attention to the accessibility of the code, it's validity and useability, plus end-user testing in multiple browsers ensures that this is the case.

Our site's code

The site has been built to comply with standards XHTML and CSS2. At every stage the code has been checked for accessibility using a range of automated and manual checks. In older browsers where CSS is not supported it will appear as an unstyled document. All information and functionality will still be accessible.

Navigation and Quick Links

Navigation is held in ordered lists to be meaningful to speach browsers and is positioned towards the bottom of the code so that readers do not have scroll past or skip it each time they visit a new page. Additionally there are hidden links the top of every page which when triggered will skip directly to the main page content or to the navigation list as required. The bottom of every page contains links to the navigation list and to jump tp the top of the page. All these links are visible when the site is viewed without a stylesheet and will be spoken by screen-reading software.

Your Feedback

Ultimately the best testers for accessibility are its users. We welcome feedback on the accessibility and usability of our website. If you have had any problems or any issues while using our site, we would like to hear about it! Email, phone and address details are on our contacts page.

Accessibility

You are currently viewing this page without a stylesheet. The following options to change font-sizes and themes ONLY work when viewing this site with style-sheeting enabled.

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Select a stylesheet:

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