Accessibility Statement

This site was designed, built and is maintained by CST Group. CST has taken an active interest in accessibility issues and have endeavoured to produce this site to a high accessiblity standard. The following features improve the accessibility for screen reader users, keyboard navigation and users of text-only browsers.

Navigation shortcuts

When viewing without a stylesheet, at the start of each page you will find a short menu that allows you to you to jump directly to the main content, main navigation or the search area. Sighted people who use the keyboard to navigate will see these links appear on screen when using the Tab key to navigate through the page if their browser fully supports this feature.

Structured, semantic markup

CST has recognised the need to use structured meaningful mark up and to separate style from content where possible. please click here for information on structured semantic markup
HTML heading tags are used to convey document structure. H1 tags are used for main titles, h2 tags for subtitles and so on. This can make it easier for people with screen reading devices to gain a quicker understanding of the page's content.
Navigation menus are marked up as XHTML lists. This ensures that it can be skipped easily and the number of links in the list is read out at the start.
Although this is no guarantee that a site is accessible, we feel that it is beneficial to the user that this site validates as XHTML strict where appropriate.

Links

Links are created so that they still have meaning when read out of context.

Images

All non-decorative images used in this site include descriptive alt attributes. Purely decorative graphics include empty alt attributes or are not included in the XHTML.

Font sizes

You may change the text size of this document to your preference through your browser:

  • In Internet Explorer, select View, then Text Size, and then your preferred size.
  • In Netscape / Firefox select View, then Text Zoom, and then your preferred percentage size.

Forms

We have tried to make our forms as accessible as possible by keeping the layout of them simple and logical. Also, Labels are associated with fields using HTML label tags, Radio and checkboxes come before the associated labels and a HTML fieldset is used to group sets of form controls together.

Scripting

The majority of the scripting is server side and the rest of the site is accessible if client side scripting is unavailable.

Having said all of that...

We're only human, and we may have made mistakes. We believe that no web site is truly accessible to everybody as people have different needs, also accessibility guidelines are constantly being reviewed and refined. If you spot any accessibility problems on this website please let us know