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ACCESSIBILITY

Website help and accessibility – we want this website to be easy to use.

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Many operating systems now include accessibility options that you can tailor to your needs on your own device. Options may include voiceover or talk back to read a screen to you, you can change screen colours or contrast, change text sizes and shortcut controls.

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To find the accessibility options on your device:

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  • Apple go to settings then general then accessibility
     

  • Android go to settings then system then accessibility
     

  • Windows go to your control panel
     

We do what we can to make sure anything on our web site helps these accessibility options to work smoothly.

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Text size – making it bigger or smaller

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You can alter the size of the text on your mobile phone or tablet by moving apart two fingers on the screen – or make it smaller by pinching your fingers together. If you change the font size in your settings you wont need to alter the size on each page.

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If you’re using a computer or laptop you can the change the font size in your browser settings or by using keyboard shortcuts

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  • CTRL + to zoom in
     

  • CTRL – to zoom out
     

  • CTRL 0 (zero) to reset to normal size
     

  • If you have a mouse scroll wheel, hold CTRL and scroll up to zoom in and scroll down to zoom out.
     

Translating from English language

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You can use Google Translate to get a word for word translation of this site, for more details see our language translation page.

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Images and alternative text

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We use images to illustrate the content of a web page. Images have text descriptions known as their ‘alt’ tag. These text descriptions explain what you should see if the image doesn’t appear on the screen.

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Opening links in a new window

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The links on our site are shown by underlined text and open in the same window. If you want a link to open in a new tab or window, on a mobile or tablet hold your finger on the link on a touch screen until a menu appears and then select the ‘open in a new tab’ on a pc or laptop put the cursor over the link and right click and then select the ‘open in a new tab’ or ‘open in a new window’ option or you can press and hold the shift button on your keyboard whilst clicking on the link you wish to open in a new window.

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PDF documents

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Portable Document Format (PDF) files can be viewed by downloading and installing a free PDF reader.

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Navigating the website

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Most people go directly to the page that their search engine decides bests answers their question. If you want to look for more information on our site we have a few ways you can do this:

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Menus – hierarchical structure

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If you want to browse through the site you can use the menus. The menus group similar content together and show the pages below the page you are viewing or pages at the same level in that subject area.

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Web site accessibility policy

We are committed to making this website accessible to the widest possible range of people, regardless of technology or ability. We are working to improve the accessibility and usability of our website.

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The Government requires all public sector websites to meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1, to Level AA. These guidelines are based on good design practice and exist to ensure that no individual is excluded due to disability or choice of device or software.

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We aim to achieve level AA, but recognise that this is not always achievable for the entire website.

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