MY Consultants

Accessibility Statement

Purpose:

Tell visitors about how the site meets accessibility guidelines, and indicate any special keys they can use to navigate the site.

The current content is taken almost verbatim from the Accessibility Statement page on Mark Pilgrim's site/online book on accessibility:

http://diveintoaccessibility.org/accessibility_statement.html

Most of the accessibility features espoused on Mark's site still have to be built into this one, but we've already made a good start and are building with accessibility in mind.

Proposed content:

Accessibility Statement

This is the official accessibility statement for MY Consultants. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to email me at feedback@myconsultants.net.

Access keys

Most browsers support jumping to specific links by typing keys defined on the web site. On Windows, you can press ALT + an access key; on Macintosh, you can press Control + an access key.

(not yet true) All pages on this site define the following access keys:

Standards compliance

  1. (not yet true) All pages on this site are Bobby AAA approved, complying with all the Bobby guidelines. Many accessibility features cannot be measured, so whether or not a site fully meets Bobby guidelines is a matter of judgement. We continually strive for full compliance, and would appreciate your help in identifying any areas where you feel we could make improvements.
  2. (not yet true) All pages on this site are WCAG AAA approved, complying wih all priority 1, 2, and 3 guidelines of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Again, we would appreciate your help in identifying any areas where you feel we could make improvements.
  3. All pages on this site are Section 508 approved, complying with all of the U.S. Federal Government Section 508 Guidelines. Again, we would appreciate your help in identifying any areas where you feel we could make improvements.
  4. 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. For example, check the home page for XHTML validity. Some site evaluation tools use such validation as the sole criterion for judging DDA compliance. DDA is the UK Disability Discrimination Act. An example of such a tool is silktide's sitescore.
  5. All pages on this site use structured semantic markup. H2 tags are used for main titles, H3 tags for subtitles. For example, on this page, JAWS users can skip to the next section within the accessibility statement by pressing ALT+INSERT+3.

Navigation aids

  1. (not yet true) All pages have rel=previous, next, up, and home links to aid navigation in text-only browsers. Netscape 6 and Mozilla users can also take advantage of this feature by selecting the View menu, Show/Hide, Site Navigation Bar, Show Only As Needed (or Show Always).
  2. All pages start with content (so that users do not have to wade through navigation before they get to the content when using screen readers or text only browsers) and have 'skip to navigation' links near the beginning of their content (not yet true).

Links

  1. (not yet true) 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.

Images

  1. All content images used in this site include descriptive ALT attributes. Purely decorative graphics include null ALT attributes.
  2. Complex images include LONGDESC attributes or inline descriptions to explain the significance of each image to non-visual readers.

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.

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.

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.

comments and questions:

The site validates, and has good semantic markup, navigation skipping and structural signposting (so goes a long way towards meeting accessibility requirements), but hasn't yet been run through Bobby as we're still on the wireframe and are still building in other features such as title attributes in links.

Mark's site has a 'Table of Contents' rather than a 'sitemap'. It could be argued that though longer, 'Table of Contents' would be clearer, as a term, to more visitors.

Mark's site also has a couple of other pages that we could consider adding - a copyright statement and a page outlining terms of use. I don't think we need to add either at the moment, but if we ever put sample workshop materials on the site, it might be an idea.

Mark's site also has separate stylesheets for screen, projection, print and aural media types.