This site is deliberately designed to be accessible to users with visual or other disabilities. To facilitate this we have made extensive use of CSS to W3C standards for layout and formatting rather than normal HTML. In this way screen readers and text-only browsers do not have to navigate through a host of formatting and imaging content in order to get to the actual content the user wants to read.
Unfortunately a downside of this choice is that some browsers, notably Microsoft Internet Explorer, do not always render CSS according to W3C standards. We have done our best to accommodate these differences but it's possible that some browser versions and/or settings may display this site in an odd way.
Most web browsers allow you to overrride the formatting defined by websites you are viewing. This can come in very handy if you have some kind of visual impairment or find certain combinations of size and colour hard to read.
The charity AbilityNet has some very good advice on setting your browser your way. rather than repeat that information here we suggest you hop over there for more information. Don't forget to come back afterwards though.
AbilityNet show how to set your preferences in Netscape/Mozilla, Internet Explorer and Opera but they don't list one of the more popular browsers, Firefox. We will try to fill in the gap here.
You can permanently change your text size and colour settings by opening the preferences dialog. This can be found either by clicking the Tools menu and then Options or by clicking the Edit menu and then Preferences.
Once in the dialog go to the Content tab. iN there you will see a Fonts and Colors section. You can choose your default font and size fromt the drop down boxes or click the Advanced button to set individual fonts for different types of text (serif, monospaced etc.).
If you want to stop websites overriding your chosen settings then click the Advanced button and then uncheck the box labelled "Allow pages to choose their own fonts..".
Finally you can set your own colour preferences by click the Color button. Again there is a checkbox in there to help you stop websites setting their own colour schemes.