We are committed to ensuring that our website is accessible to everyone. If you have any questions or suggestions regarding the accessibility of this site, please use our Contact Form. We will do what we can to improve the experience for you.
Standards compliance
- All pages on this site comply as closely as possible with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 AA guidelines.
- All pages on this site validate as HTML5.
- All pages on this site use structured semantic markup. H1 tags are used for the content area of the page, H2 tags are used for main titles, H3 tags for subtitles. For example, on this page, JAWS users can skip to the next section within the accessibility statement by pressing 2.
Structural markup
Web pages include 3 different areas:
- A header bar,
- A main content area,
- A footer.
When CSS (Cascading Styles Sheets) are not applied to a document (or when using a screen reader), the 4 areas are read in the above order.
W3C WAI-ARIA Landmarks
This website makes use of some of the new HTML5/WAI-ARIA markup that enhances the identification of major sections and roles on each page. A screen reader will identify major landmarks on the page such as the content area, navigation mechanisms and the search area. JAWS users can use the ";" key to navigate through these sections. The ARIA landmarks used include banner, search, navigation, main, complementary, article and contentinfo.
Access keys
Because of the way browsers have implemented the access key attribute inconsistently, unfortunately, access keys often clash with keys set aside for use with other User Agents (i.e. assistive technology). For this reason, we have decided to not set default access keys.
Images
- Unless they are purely decorative items, all images used on this web site have suitable alt attributes.
- Content should be usable/accessible with images "off" (disabled).
Links
- Every effort is made to have Links written so that they make sense out of context. When this is not possible textually, or does not make sense when written in this form, then a title attribute or other type of navigational aid is added to create context.
- The first link in every document is a "SkipNav". This allows the user to skip directly to what is considered the main section of the page (the content).
- URLs are permanent whenever possible.
Forms
- All form controls are appropriately and explicitly labeled.
- Form validation routine does not rely on client-side script.
Scripts
- We are using non obtrusive client-side scripts.
- Content of this web site is usable without JavaScript support.
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.
- Any information conveyed through the use of color is also available without color (i.e. text based).
- A “resize” widget has not been added to this site; however, all the functionality that would be provided by such a widget is already built into all major browsers (see Increasing The Text Size in Web Pages For more information)
Software to improve accessibility for visitors
- NVDA a free, open source screen reader (Windows)
- System Access (Windows)
- JAWS (Windows)
- VoiceOver (Mac)
- Orca (Linux)
