Accessibility Information
The World Wide Web Consortium

Updated:  25 May 2018

Accessibility Information

W3C Web Standards

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is a diverse collection of important figures within the internet world – technology developers, content providers, corporate users, research laboratories, standards bodies, and governments, all of whom endeavor to apply a set of guidelines to the way that websites are designed and maintained in order to ensure that website content is available to the largest possible number of users, regardless of how they view how they browse the web, what tools they use and whether they have any disability.

As a means to exact these guidelines upon web developers the W3C has developed a site validation service, which tests websites files for conformance to the W3C recommendations. This validation service is offered for XHTML (the file type we use to bring a site’s content to your internet browser) and CSS (the file which integrates our design into the ‘code’ behind your website), all of our websites will comply with this validation and as such go some way towards providing a fully accessible web design.

Website Accessibility

Why does our site need to be accessible? An accessible website has a huge number of advantages – blind users may utilize a screen reader which uses speech synthesis to read out a website’s content, valid and semantic XHTML design means that this will work the way that the software intends. Partially sighted visitors will need to increase the size of the text on our website and valid CSS design will be needed to allow this to happen. Deaf visitors and those with no mouse access along with web users with color-blindness and even epilepsy are also considered.

Accessibility on This Site

The site uses semantically correct mark-up (the correct tag for the correct purpose), text size can be increased via your browser and wherever Flash and JavaScript are used, measures have been put in place to ensure that viewers without Flash 7 or with JavaScript disabled will still be able to use the site to it’s full potential.

Cookies

What is a cookie?

Most sites today make use of cookies – these are small files that a website stores on the user’s computer in order to enhance the functionality of the website.

Cookies used on this website

This website uses relatively few cookies. Cookies used on this site are for the following purposes:

  • Facilitates use of Google Analytics

These cookies are not harmful in any way, nor do we collect any personal information on website users. If you so wish, you can disable cookies by changing the security options in your web browser.

Further details are listed below.

Cookie name Cookie description
__utma A persistent cookie – remains on a computer, unless it expires or the cookie cache is cleared. It tracks visitors. Metrics associated with the Google __utma cookie include: first visit (unique visit), last visit (returning visit). This also includes Days and Visits to purchase calculations which afford ecommerce websites with data intelligence around purchasing sales funnels.
__utmb & __utmc These cookies work in tandem to calculate visit length. Google __utmb cookie demarks the exact arrival time, then Google __utmc registers the precise exit time of the user. Because __utmb counts entrance visits, it is a session cookie, and expires at the end of the session, e.g. when the user leaves the page. A timestamp of 30 minutes must pass before Google cookie __utmc expires.Given__utmc cannot tell if a browser or website session ends. Therefore, if no new page view is recorded in 30 minutes the cookie is expired.This is a standard ‘grace period’ in web analytics. Ominture and WebTrends among many others follow the same procedure.
__utmz Cookie __utmz monitors the HTTP Referrer and notes where a visitor arrived from, with the referrer siloed into type (Search engine (organic or cpc), direct, social and unaccounted). From the HTTP Referrer the __utmz Cookie also registers, what keyword generated the visit plus geolocation data.This cookie lasts six months. In tracking terms this Cookie is perhaps the most important as it will tell you about your traffic and help with conversion information such as what source / medium / keyword to attribute for a Goal Conversion.
__utmv Google __utmv Cookie lasts ‘forever’. It is a persistant cookie. It is used for segmentation, data experimentation and the __utmv works hand in hand with the __utmz cookie to improve cookie targeting capabilities.
__ga Used to distinguish users.
__gid Used to distinguish users.
__gat Used to throttle request date
__unam The “__unam” cookie is set as part of the ShareThis service and monitors “click-stream” activity, eg web pages viewed and navigated and time spent on pages.
__stid Part of the ShareThis sharing button functionality.  Unique identifiers given to each computer to allow traffic analysis to ShareThis.