ABOUT ACCESSIBILITY
Accessibility means that a website should be designed
so that people with vision or hearing difficulties can still access
the information within a site. In the case of this website, there
is no sound, so our primary focus is on visual aspects. Visual difficulties
encompass a wide range of problems, ranging from a simple inability
to read small text to complete lack of vision. Solutions used to
overcome these situations include allowing the user to change the
font size, to the use of software that reads aloud everything on
the page (known as 'screen readers') to hardware devices that can
translate the screen image into Braille.
In an increasing number of countries, there are laws which state
that any publicly-accessible website must not offer content on the
web that a person with disabilities cannot access. So for example,
if you have a page with a competition entry form that is built in
Flash, which screen readers cannot read, then you are effectively
disciminating against people with poor vision.
This site has been designed so that people with impaired vision
can easily change the font size. There is no information within
a Flash document that is not also available elsewhere. And the contrast
between text / graphics and background makes the content easy to
read.
Controlling Font Sizes
The major browsers offer a facility for the user to set a larger
or smaller font size. In Internet Explorer 5 and above, you can
quickly do this by holding down the Control key and moving your
mouse wheel (if you have one) up or down. In Netscape 6, press Control
and + or -. You can also change font size from the browser menu
(in both IE and Netscape go to view > text size).
Contrast
We could not find any definition of what constitutes an acceptable
level of contrast, however the principle is that there should be
sufficient difference between the colour of text and the background
colour behind it to make reading easy. A particular point to watch
out for is in the use of coloured text and backgrounds - blue text
on a green background, for instance, might not be legible at all
if a person has limited colour perception (a good test of contrast
is to print a page in black and white).
Standards
There are several sets of standards relating to website accessibility.
The core concept in designing accessible web pages is the proper
use of HTML and CSS - adhering to the standards makes it fairly
straightforward for various devices to interpret pages. For example,
most web designers use tables to create page layouts - but in HTML
the only correct use of a table is to present tabular data.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) offers a set of guidelines
as to how Cascading Style Sheets may be used to control page layout
to generate an attractive layout without using tables. For more
information, go to .
The US Rehabilitation Act Section 508 lays down legal guidelines
for sites developed by US Government Agencies (it does not apply
to non-Governmental organisations).
Bobby
Bobby is a piece of software that can analyse any web page and produce
a report that highlights any problems for the disabled. To check
a single page, go to
. Here you can type in the URL of the page and receive an instant
analysis of it. |
