Skip navigation | Accessibility and accesskey details | Sitemap

About this Site: Accessibility

This Site

The NAO website has been developed with accessibility in mind. All html is standardised (HTML 4.01 Transitional) and cascading style sheets ('CSS') are used to control visual and print formatting.

For the most part this site achieves the WAI 'A' rating. The large number of acrobat documents means that the 'AA' rating is not achieved, though all the html is of this standard. We are continuing to work on some pages that use live databases to bring them up to standard.

Scaling Text

You can scale the text in your browser:

• Use the 'bigger text' and 'smaller text' buttons on the top menu bar to scale the screen size.
• Or, on Microsoft Internet Explorer use the Text Size option off the View menu to select an appropriate size for yourself.
• On Netscape Navigator use the View menu and choose Increase Font until the text is the size you require.

To reset the text size:

• To cancel resizing and reset to defaults, click the 'Reset text' button.

Changing colours

It is possible to change the default colours (both text and background) that your browser uses for all sites, including this one. This can be achieved by changing preferences in your browser:

• If you use Microsoft Internet Explorer, go to the Tools menu, select Internet Options, select Colors and make changes to text and background colours in the Colors panel.
• If you use Netscape Navigator, go to the Edit menu, select Preferences, open the Appearance menu and select Colors. You can set the colour of text and background from here.

Accesskey

"Access keys" are used to assist users with disabilities when navigating their way through this web site. Access keys provide access to certain commonly used pages without the need for a mouse. At present, only Microsoft Internet Explorer supports access keys and using them depends upon what type of operating system you use:

• Windows based computers
  Pressing "ALT" and the access key will give focus to that specific link on the page. The you must press the return key to be taken to the page.
• Macintosh based computers
  Pressing "CTRL" and the access key will immediately send you to that specific page.

The access keys used on this site are:

• 0 = Accessibility Page
• 1 = Home Page
• 2 = News & Press
• 3 = Sitemap
• 4 = Search
• A = About NAO
• S = Skip Navigation

Adobe Acrobat and Accessibility

As a large proportion of the content of this website is contained in Adobe Acrobat files, we recommend that you always use the latest version of the Acrobat plug-in. Adobe is aware of the accessibility challenge that Acrobat files can pose, and have worked accessibility features into the 5 (or greater) version of the plugin. These include the ability to reflow documents and deal with Unicode characters. To read more about these features are and how you might benefit from them, visit the Adobe Accessibility pages.

There is a conversion tool that converts PDF documents to HTML pages available on the Adobe site. To use this tool, paste the complete URL of the PDF into the form - an html version will be created when you submit the form. There is also an email facility which will email you an html or text file translated from a URL or attached file.

To download the latest Acrobat plug-in, visit the Accessible Page for downloading Acrobat