Website Accessibility
Mouse Free Navigation
Instead of using access keys, which often require extreme feats of digital dexterity, the site used a system of tabbed access. Press the tab key once and the first link on the page will appear with a yellow background to show it is highlighted. Repeating the process will move the user through successive links one at a time. When a link that you want to follow is highlighted, pressing the enter key will take you to the page which is the target of the link. Holding down the shift key while pressing the tab key (SHIFT+TAB) will rotate you through the links in the opposite direction to using the tab key alone.
Changing the Size of Text
The website has been build making extensive use of Cascading Style Sheets. This allows the user to increase the size of all the text on the page using the the browser's text size function.
In Microsoft Internet Explorer, click on the 'View' menu to reveal the drop down options list, click on 'Text Size', then select either 'Larger' or 'Largest' to increase the size of the text by small or large degree.
Improving Colour Contrast
In Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5, click on the 'Tools' menu to reveal the drop down options list.
Click on Internet Options and a menu box will appear.
Click on the Accessibility button that is at the bottom right of the menu box.
Click the box next to 'Ignore colours specified on web pages' so that it is 'ticked'.
Click on 'OK' once to return to the options menu.
Click on the 'Colours' button that is at the bottom left of the menu box.
Click on the 'Use Windows colours' so that it is unselected (the tick disappears)
Click on the item that you wish to modify the colour of and select a colour from the colour palette.
NB you can alter the colour of text, the background colour and the colour of unvisited links, hovered and visited links.
Click once on the OK button to return to the 'Colours' menu.
Make further modifications to other items - its worth playing around a little to find a combination which suits you.
Click on OK again when you've completed your modifications and the colours displayed on the screen should change to match your choices.
Personal Style Sheets
If you need to make changes greater than those allowed in the browser settings, you can load a personal style sheet which will override the text size and colour settings specified in the website's style sheet. The facility for applying your own style sheet can be found in the tools>accessibility menu in Internet Explorer 5.5 and later.
