Accessibility
Enhanced website accessibility
The following features enhance our website's accessibility;
- All text should be resizable using your browser's text-resize option,
- HTML heading elements have been used to represent page structure, supporting assistive technologies that allow page navigation from heading to heading,
- All hyperlinks should make sense when read out of context, and hyperlinks change colour when the destination page has been visited,
- All images have been given appropriate alternative text,
- A navigation bar linking to the main sections of the site is provided at the top and bottom of each page
- A 'breadcrumb trail' navigation feature is provided to help navigation, and
- The site has been tested to ensure that it is accessible in a wide range of browsers.
Keyboard access
- On each page a 'skip to main content' link allows direct access past the navigation bars to the page's main content, which should make navigation easier if you are using the keyboard or other input device to browse.
- However, keyboard shortcuts are no longer provided for site pages, given the likely problems they may cause though conflicting with keyboard shortcuts used for other programs (e.g. browsers, screen readers). If this causes you a problem, please let us know!
- Using Access Keys - is it worth it? Wats.ca An article from Canadian web accessibility group Wats.ca on the problems of HTML access keys as keyboard shortcuts.
- We know that keyboard accessiblity of web sites needs to be improved, so we're watching with interest developments in providing user-defined access keys - where the web site allows you to specify your own keyboard shortcuts. This way, we wouldn't be second-guessing which shortcuts you would like - you can set your own. There are a few trial solutions in use, for example Gez Lemon's User Defined Access Keys...we're monitoring reaction to these.
Visual Design
- Cascading Style Sheets have been used to control the presentation of pages and properly structured markup has been used for content, for a full explanation of the accessibility benefits of this see "Why using CSS improves accessibility"
- If stylesheets are not supported or are turned off, information on the site can still be accessed and read
- Relative font sizes are used, which allows users to resize text as neededin the top right hand corner
Standards Compliance
This is the technical bit!
- All HTML should validate as HTML 4.01 Strict using the W3C markup validator
- All stylesheets should validate using W3C CSS validator
- All pages should comply with our interpretation of all relevant priority 1,2 and 3 Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, with the following exceptions:
- Regarding Checkpoint 11.1, we consider HTML 4.01 Strict to be acceptable as a 'latest version' of a W3C technology
- Regarding Checkpoint 14.2, the nature of our site is that it's mainly textual content, and thus we don't have many instances of graphical content to supplement our text. We will, though, make sure that wherever we can support our textual content with graphical content if it helps understanding.