We’re committed to making this website accessible and usable, and will continue to make efforts to improve where we can. Images All content images used in this site should include descriptive alt tags. Purely decorative graphics include null alt tags. Complex images include longdesc tags or inline descriptions to explain the significance of each image to non-visual readers. Downloadable files Our publications are available to download from this website in Adobe® PDF file format. Other documents are available in a variety of formats including PDF, Microsoft Word (MS Word) and Microsoft Excel (MS Excel). Most computers already have software to open these document formats, but free document readers are also available to download:

• Free viewer for Microsoft Word
• Free viewer for Microsoft Excel
• Free Adobe Acrobat Reader (for reading PDFs)

Newer versions of Adobe Acrobat Reader (6 and above) have incorporated accessibility features which can be accessed in the Edit preferences menu. If you can’t use Acrobat Reader to access these documents, Adobe provide a free online conversion tool which will covert PDF documents into web pages (HTML) or plain text.

• Adobe online conversion tool

Visual design This site primarily uses cascading style sheets for visual layout. The use of tables for layout has been kept to a bare minimum. 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 style sheets at all, the content of each page should still be readable. Accessibility references

• W3 accessibility guidelines, which explains the reasons behind each guideline.
• W3 accessibility techniques, which explains how to implement each guideline.
• W3 accessibility checklist , a busy developer’s guide to accessibility.

Accessibility software

• JAWS, a screen reader for Windows. A time-limited, 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 style sheets, image toggle. A free downloadable version is available which is compatible with Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and several other operating systems.

Accessibility services

• Web Page Backward Compatibility Viewer, a tool for viewing your web pages without a variety of modern browser features.
• Lynx Viewer, a free service for viewing what your web pages would look like in Lynx.