Accessibility statement

Keyboard shortcuts

Most browsers support jumping to specific links by typing keys defined on the web site. On Windows, you can press ALT + an access key; on Macintosh, you can press Control + an access key (this also depends on the browser used). In this website the following keyboard shortcuts are defined:

• access key 0 - Link to accessibility statement (this page)
• access key 1 - Link to EEA home page
• access key 2 - Skip to content
• access key 3 - Sitemap
• access key 4 - Link to normal search mode
• access key 5 - Link to expert search mode
• access key 6 - Skip to navigation

Standards compliance

• the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (WAI-AA)
• pages validate XHTML 1.0 Transitional
• the Cascading Style Sheets implemented respect the CSS2 Specification
• the web site is still usable without style sheets

Navigation aids

• the bread crumb trail - links to all parent folders from the current location to the root
• the navigation for the regular end-users does not imply opening of pop-ups windows and the return to the previous page can be easily done through the back button from the browser
• an accessibility link is provided to the main content for every page

Links

• links have TITLE attributes which describe the link
• link names make sense out of context
• the link's colour is chosen to contrast sufficiently with the background colour, and they are distinguishable by having a different text-decoration.
• visited links and active ones are marked with different colours

Images

• all content images used in the website include descriptive ALT attributes
• purely decorative graphics include null ALT attributes so they will not be interpreted by speech synthesizers

Visual design

• this website uses cascading style sheets (CSS2) for visual layout
• only relative font sizes are used, compatible with the user-specified "text size" option in visual browsers
• the website uses colour safely. The pages layout is designed in web safe colours
• if your browser or browsing device used does not support stylesheets at all, the content of each page is still readable and comprehensible

Content structure and other specific elements

• The HTML code of every page starts with the appropriate DOCTYPE declaration
• The language is identified on every page of the web site
• The heading(s) element of every page - h5 and h6 - have a title specific to the page content:
• Semantically correct markup: the content is well structured and uses the correct HTML tags for the various semantic elements (headers, lists, accessible table information, etc.)
• The web site does not uses frames, multimedia content (video, audio)
• JavaScript is necessary to be enabled in some of the more complex pages
• LABELs are used for all visible form elements
• Tables linearize correctly - web site can be used in text based browsers like Lynx
• Metadata information is present in all pages
• TITLEs are used in every page to provide enhanced user experience and accessibility