Accessible Design

This site employs many features to make information more accessible:

• Images have text alternates (ALT attributes)
• All text uses relative font sizes so text can be enlarged or reduced using the text size options available in visual browsers
• The site can be navigated without the use of a mouse
• All pages use flexible page formats so pages can be automatically resized for different window sizes and screen resolutions
• Page formatting is done with CSS not tables to ensure that the semantic structure of the information is preserved
• All pages are designed with separate cascading style sheets, so they can be replaced by user-defined style sheets
• This site follows World Wide Web and NZ e-Government accessibility guidelines

Using the site without a mouse

Shortcut keys will take you to commonly used pages such as the home page:

The procedure for using shortcut, or 'access' keys, varies depending on which web browser you view the site with. The following table shows the AccessKey combinations for a range of popular web browsers:

Use of text on this site

Most navigation elements are plain text and we have provided text alternatives to graphics on the site.

Those with poor sight may be able to increase the size of the text on screen. The procedure for doing so differs from one browser to the next. The table below outlines the procedure for some popular browsers. If your browser does not appear in the table the following guidelines may be of assistance: In general, looking under the "View" selection on the main menu, you should find an option called "Text Zoom" or "Text Magnification" or "Text Size" or "Font Size". From that point it should be relatively simple to find and select an additional sub menu option that adjusts text size to your needs.