Our website and the information on it is designed to be as accessible and usable as possible.
We want everybody to be able to find what they need, regardless of any disability or impairment.
To achieve this our webpages are designed to work with a range of assistive technologies.
We also test that our website works with recent versions of all the 'major' web browsers: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome.
Help is at hand
If you are experiencing difficulties using our website, or if you feel we could improve anything, please tell us about it. We will do our best to help.
The BBC's My Web My Way website provides information on configuring your computer or browser to make the web more accessible for you.
Standards
We are working to meet the AA standard of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0).
The guidelines are designed to help make content accessible to a wide range of people with disabilities, but following them often makes content more usable to all users.
Technologies
To meet the WCAG standard we do our best to produce content that is written in clear, semantic (X)HTML.
We use CSS and JavaScript where necessary to control presentation and behaviour respectively, although these are non-essential and do not affect the page contents if turned off.
In cases where we cannot guarantee content is accessible, for example when we use Google maps to present information, we make sure the information is available in an accessible format elsewhere on the website.
Access keys
Access keys provide keyboard shortcuts to go to common and useful pages of a website or to skip past the page navigation on a webpage.
We have tried to follow the UK Government access keys standard on our website.
The access keys we use are:
- s - Skip navigation
- 1 - Homepage
- 4 - Search
- 6 - Help
- 7 - Complaints procedure
- 8 - Privacy statement
- 9 - Contact us
- 0 - Access key details
Access keys typically require you to press and hold a key or keys along with the relevant access key. They work differently on different web browsers; refer to your browser's help pages for more information.
