Accessibility on this site

Standards compliance

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1. This site complies with all priority 1, 2, and 3 guidelines of the W3 Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and is Bobby AAA approved. It has also been tested by the automated accessibility tester at Cynthia Says. LIFT - NN/g edition was used during the building of this site to verify its accessibility features.
2. The code used validates as HTML 4 Transitional.
3. The pages use structured semantic markup where necessary. JAWS users can skip through the header hierarchy by using ALT+INSERT+2, ALT+INSERT+3 and so on.

Access keys

Most modern browsers support jumping to specific links by typing an 'access key'. On Windows, you do this by pressing ALT + the access key; on Macintosh, you press Control + the access key.

The following access keys are used on this site:

Access key 1

Home page

Access key 2

Skip navigation

Access key 3

Site Map

Access key 9

Contact Information

Access key 0

Accessibility features (this page)

Links

1. Many links have title attributes which describe the link in greater detail, unless the text of the link already fully describes the target.
2. 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.
3. Link text is never duplicated; two links with the same link text always point to the same address.
4. High resolution versions of some of the images in the site open in a new window. This is never done without warning the user that this will happen.

Help with navigation

The structure of the site is extremely simple and I hope that users will be able to find their way around the various sections easily. Nevertheless, there is a simple site map which can be used to access any part of the site directly.

Images

The site is of necessity based around often complex images. These have been made as accessible as possible in the following ways.

1. All content images used on every page throughout the site include descriptive ALT attributes. Decorative or functional graphics have been kept to an absolute minimum and where they do occur include null ALT attributes.
2. All complex images include LONGDESC attributes and links to text-only descriptions to explain each image to non-visual readers. The text-only description can be accessed by using the 'd' link immediately after the image.

Visual design

The site uses a cascading style sheet for visual layout. No tables are used on this site except for the home page and there only for centering the main image.

1. The stylesheet uses relative font sizes and is written to display pages correctly in most commonly-used modern browsers (except Netscape 4).
2. In Netscape 4, earlier browsers or browsing device that do not support stylesheets at all, the content of every page is still readable and makes linear sense.

Accessibility references

1. W3 accessibility guidelines, which explains the reasons behind each guideline.
2. W3 accessibility techniques, which explains how to implement each guideline.
3. W3 accessibility checklist, a busy developer's guide to accessibility.
4. U.S. Federal Government Section 508 accessibility guidelines.
5. I am indebted to the excellent accessibility resource created by Mark Pilgrim at the Dive Into Accessibility project at his site Dive Into Mark. A lot of what I've learned about accessibility on the Web has come from him, not least much of the content and layout of this accessibility statement.

Accessibility software and services

1. Bobby, a free service to analyse web pages for compliance to accessibility guidelines.
2. HTML Validator, a free service for checking that web pages conform to published HTML standards.
3. Web Page Backward Compatibility Viewer, a tool for viewing your web pages without a variety of modern browser features.
4. JAWS, a screen reader for Windows. A time-limited demo is available.
5. Lynx, a free text-only web browser.

Feedback

I hope that this site is accessible and usable to everyone who visits it. If you have had difficulty in any aspect of the user experience, or if you have any comments, suggestions or complaints about the site's accessibility, please let me know by using the feedback form on the [Contact details] page. I will be happy to incorporate improvements to the site as a result of these suggestions.