Accessibility Statement

Introduction

Every effort has been made to make this website as accessible to as wide a range of people as possible. We are committed to ongoing accessibility improvements. If you are having difficulty accessing this website for any reason or would like to give us some feedback, please contact us.

You may enlarge the font size of this website using your browsers menu (for example use the View Menu and choose text size largest)

Access keys

Most browsers support jumping to specific links by typing keys defined on the web site. On Windows, you can press ALT + an access key(you may have to then press return); on Macintosh, you can press Control + an access key.

All pages on this site define the following access keys:

Access key 1 - Home page
Access key 2 - Skip Navigation
Access key 0 - Accessibility statement

Navigation aids

All pages have home and search links to aid navigation in text-only browsers. Netscape 6 and Mozilla users can also take advantage of this feature by selecting the View menu, Show/Hide, Site Navigation Bar, Show Only As Needed (or Show Always).

Screen reader software like JAWS can access the search easily and also skip past the navigation bar directly to the content by selecting the links which read out first of all on the page.

Images

All content images used in this site include descriptive ALT attributes in most cases. Purely decorative graphics include null ALT attributes.

Visual design

This site uses cascading style sheets for styling.
This site uses only relative font sizes, compatible with the user-specified "text size" option in visual browsers. Netscape 4 does not support these relative font sizes.
If your browser or browsing device does not support stylesheets at all, the content of each page is still readable.

Accessibility software

JAWS - a screen reader for Windows. A time-limited, downloadable demo is available.
MAGIC - screen magnification software.
Home Page Reader , a screen reader for Windows. A downloadable demo is available.
Lynx , a free text-only web browser for blind users with refreshable Braille displays.
Links , a free text-only web browser for visual users with low bandwidth.
Opera , a visual browser with many accessibility-related features, including text zooming, user stylesheets, image toggle. A free downloadable version is available. Compatible with Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and several other operating systems.

Accessibility Testers

The site has been tested using manual and automatic testers. Dreamweaver and Cynthia Says were used in the testing against Report Mode Section 508 and also WCAG priority 1. With exception to the scrolling news on the home page, the site passes these tests. News is accessible from the news section without being dependant on the scrolling news.