Accessibility Statement North Star is committed to providing a website that is accessible to the widest possible audience, regardless of technology or ability.

The site was built to ensure the accessibility and usability of this website and in doing so, adhere to internationally accepted standards and guidelines. This website endeavours to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Version 2.0 (WCAG 2.0) at a minimum “Double-A” (AA) rating. The guidelines, drawn up by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), explain how to make web content more accessible to people with disabilities. We seek to ensure that this website is accessible to people who use assistive technology like screen readers and speech-input software and those unable to use a mouse or a pointing device.

Accessibility features on this site include:

• Strong colour contrasts
• Text can be resized easily
• Page layout is flexible (it resizes according to the width of your browser window)
• Headings are used correctly to make them readable through screen readers
• All form fields have labels, and follow a logical tab sequence to ensure easy navigation
• We use cascading style sheets (CSS) to determine the presentation of our website – this assists those using screen-reading devices
• Where we use images, we use alternative text so that those who cannot see the image can read the text. These can be read by screen-reading devices
• Most pdf files on this site are tagged to allow basic accessibility

This site has been built using code compliant with W3C standards for HTML and CSS. The site displays correctly in current browsers and using standards-compliant HTML/CSS code means any future browsers will also display it correctly.

If you are using a public or shared computer to access this site please use https://translate.google.co.uk/ and copy the link to our website to translate.

Browsers and operating systems that we support

This website is built to support the latest three versions of evergreen browsers. Evergreen browsers are those that self-update (Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera and IE10+). Where users visit using a non-evergreen browser we support those that have a global usage of 2% or greater to partially support.

List of supported browsers:

• Chrome: 38, 37 and 36
• Firefox: 33, 32 and 31
• Safari: 8, 7 and 6
• Opera 25, 24 and 23
• Internet Explorer 11 and 10
• Internet Explorer 9 and 8 are partially supported

Operating systems:

• XP
• Vista
• Windows 7
• Mac OS X 10.4 and above

Browser updates are available free of charge from each browser provider. Operating systems can be purchased from software vendors. We will update our list of supported browsers and operating systems from time to time as the software used by our customers changes. We also endeavour to support the most popular combinations of these browsers and operating systems, for example Internet Explorer 8 with Windows 7.

Reasons to upgrade your browser

• New versions are more secure
• New versions are faster
• Improved browsing experience Browser updates are available from Microsoft, Firefox, Safari, Google.

Whilst North Star strives to adhere to accepted guidelines and standards for accessibility and usability, rapid changes in technology mean is it is not always possible to do so in all areas of the website. We are, however, continually seeking solutions to address accessibility issues.