Accessibility

- making it easier for everyone to view this site

Standards compliance

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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.

The code used to create the site validates as HTML 4 Transitional, and the CSS has also been validated.

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

Many links have title attributes which describe the link in greater detail, unless the text of the link already fully describes the target.

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.

Some links on the site will open a new browser window (when the page being linked to is on an external site other than Wayouteast). A new window is never opened without a warning in the 'title' attribute of the link.

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

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

All content images used on every page throughout the site include descriptive ALT attributes. Decorative or functional graphics include null ALT attributes.
Occasionally, complex images may have 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 for layout on this site.

The stylesheet uses relative font sizes and is written to display pages correctly in most commonly-used modern browsers (except Netscape 4).

In Netscape 4, earlier browsers, or browsing devices that do not support stylesheets at all, the content of every page is still readable and makes linear sense.

Accessibility references

W3 accessibility guidelines, which explains the reasons behind each guideline.
W3 accessibility techniques, which explains how to implement each guideline.
W3 accessibility checklist, a busy developer's guide to accessibility.
U.S. Federal Government Section 508 accessibility guidelines.
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

Bobby, a free service to analyse web pages for compliance to accessibility guidelines.
HTML Validator, a free service for checking that web pages conform to published HTML standards.
Web Page Backward Compatibility Viewer, a tool for viewing your web pages without a variety of modern browser features.
JAWS, a screen reader for Windows. A time-limited demo is available.
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 contact me. I will be happy to incorporate improvements to the site as a result of these suggestions.