Accessibility
What is Betsie?
Betsie stands for BBC Education Text to Speech Internet Enhancer, and is a facility which is intended to alleviate some of the problems experienced by people using text to speech systems for web browsing. For further information on Betsie, please see the BBC's About Betsie website.
Adobe Acrobat
Many of the documents on this site are in HTML format. This format is generally accessible to people who use screen readers. We also have a large number of documents in Adobe Acrobat® Portable Document Format (PDF).
PDF format is used to preserve the content and layout of our hard copy publications. Publications in PDF can only be viewed and printed using the Adobe AcrobatReader®. You can download and get help using the Acrobat Reader at the Adobe Systems, Inc. site. The downloadable Acrobat Reader software is available at NO CHARGE from Adobe.
Download Acrobat Reader
People using screen-reading devices generally are unable to read documents directly in PDF format, unless they have an accessibility plug-in installed on their system along with the Adobe Acrobat Reader. This plug-in is available at NO CHARGE from Adobe. Adobe also has online tools that will convert PDF files to HTML on request. To get the plug-in and latest news about Adobe's accessibility tools and services, visit the Access Adobe site.
Access Adobe
Many links have title attributes which describe the link in greater detail, unless the text of the link already fully describes the target (such as the headline of an article).
Wherever possible, links are written to make sense out of context. Many browsers (such as JAWS, Home Page Reader, Lynx, and Opera) can extract the list of links on a page and allow the user to browse the list, separately from the page.
Link text is never duplicated; two links with the same link text always point to the same address.
All downloadable pdf documents and links to external websites open in a new window.
All content images used in the home page and all archives include descriptive ALT attributes. Purely decorative graphics include null ALT attributes.
This site and all its archives use cascading style sheets for visual layout.
If your browser or browsing device does not support stylesheets at all, the content of each page is still readable.
At the top of each page there is a javascript facility to increase the font size whilst preserving the visual layout of the page.
