Site accessibility

Standards compliance

1. All pages on this site is WCAG AAA approved, complying wih all priority 1, 2, and 3 guidelines of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines . Again, this is a judgement call; many guidelines are intentionally vague and can not be tested automatically. We have reviewed all the guidelines and believe that all these pages are in compliance.
2. All pages on this site validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional . This is not a judgement call; a program can determine with 100% accuracy whether a page is valid XHTML. Every page has a link to the validator and can easily be checked.
3. All pages on this site use structured semantic markup. H1 tags are used for main titles, H3 tags for subtitles.

Navigation aids

1. All pages have next, up, and home links to aid navigation in text-only browsers.
2. All pages include a search box and links to an advanced search (access key A).

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 (such as the headline of an article).
2. Links are written to make sense out of context.
3. Any link which opens in a new window using JavaScript also has a none JavaScript alternative.

Images

1. All content images used in this site include descriptive ALT attributes. Purely decorative graphics include null ALT attributes.

Visual design

1. This site uses cascading style sheets for visual layout.
2. This site uses only relative font sizes, compatible with the user-specified "text size" option in visual browsers.
3. If your browser or browsing device does not support stylesheets at all, the content of each page is still readable.
4. The site is useable on every browsing device including WebTV, PDAs, Smartphones and older computers.
5. Each page includes the functionality to increase / decrease the text size.
6. Each page can be viewed in a 'high contrast' mode for the visually impaired.

Issues

1. Some versions of Internet Explorer do not render all of the information on the page. Doing an Edit > Select all (Ctrl-A or Apple-A) will show any missing information. This is a documented problem with Internet Explorer and not an issue with this site.
2. Some older browsers will not display the stylesheets resulting in a 'minimal graphic' version of the site with a very basic layout. All of the information and functionality is still available and ensures full compatibiilty.

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.

Accessibility software

1. JAWS , a screen reader for Windows. A time-limited, downloadable demo is available.
2. Home Page Reader , a screen reader for Windows. A downloadable demo is available.
3. Lynx , a free text-only web browser for blind users with refreshable Braille displays.
4. Links , a free text-only web browser for visual users with low bandwidth.
5. Opera , a visual browser with many accessibility-related features, including text zooming, user stylesheets, image toggle. A free downloadable version is available. Compatible with Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and several other operating systems.

Accessibility services

1. Bobby , a free service to analyze web pages for compliance to accessibility guidelines. A full-featured commercial version is also available.
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. Lynx Viewer , a free service for viewing what your web pages would look like in Lynx.

Related resources

1. WebAIM , a non-profit organization dedicated to improving accessibility to online learning materials.
2. Designing More Usable Web Sites , a large list of additional resources.