This site does not use the accesskey attribute by default. This is because access keys are known to clash with other assistive technology and can often cause more harm than good. However, the site does have numerous skip navigation links that will let you jump to the site navigation, main content and footer links respectively. These links were built using the skip navigation builder tool which you can also use for the same purpose.
All other navigation is based on unordered lists, each list preceded by a suitable heading. This enables users with assistive tech to jump from navigation block, regardless of the skip navigation links that have been provided.
We don't believe in providing text size widgets here - this site is built using scalable font measurements, so you should not have any issues reading the content at any size. In fact, we're so sure that these kinds of font resizing widgets are a bad idea that we went on a bit of a crusade. Better to teach the user how to use their browser for all web sites rather than force them to set the option for each and every site that uses some variation of font size widget:
In addition to the features above, Accessify also uses ARIA document landmark roles. (If you like, you can highlight the ARIA Landmark areas on this page.) These role attributes - which define roles of key sections of the site such as navigation, article content and so on - are dynamically added in after page load using JavaScript rather than appearing in the markup by default. This is to ensure that the pages validate while also allowing assistive technology to make good use of this additional information.
We're open to suggestions about how other sections of this site may benefit from additional ARIA treatment. Just use the contact us at the end of the page to drop us a line.
All pages are built to comply with the following standards (or recommendations):
Previously, the site was built to XHTML standard, but this offered little in the way of benefits (as pages were never served with the correct MIME-type), so it was put back to HTML 4.01 in the 2008 redesign. And why not?
If you discover any problems with this web site, please report the problem and someone will fix it.
All images used on this web site have suitable alt attributes (or empty alt attributes if they are used for purely decorative reasons). If you spot some that are not correct, please let us know.
JavaScript is kept to a bare minimum on this site, and no content section should be unusable if JavaScript is not enabled or not supported in your web browser. We use jQuery for visual effects and to plug holes in some browsers' inability to do things such as changing styles on links when tabbed to rather than just being moused over. All JavaScript is unobtrusive - that is, it's added on top of the basic page content - thus the page content and navigation is usable and readable with JavaScript switched off. There's just one section that doesn't work with JavaScript switched off ...
The Tools & Wizards section does make fairly extensive use of JavaScript in some of the code-generating tools and these are definitely not going to work when scripting is disabled. The assumption is that the visitors to this site are, primarily, people who care about building accessible sites and these tools are there to help them achieve this aim, as opposed to visitors coming to this site because they have certain needs themselves.
This is definitely a case where we should be leading by example, so if you think any of the above just doesn't quite work for you, please drop us a line and we'll look into it.
