Accessibility Statement
Severn Delta is committed to ensuring that all of our websites, including this one, are accessible to everyone. If you do encounter any difficulties using this site, please do contact us, and we will make every effort to improve the site.
This statement applies to all pages within the site which are under our control, but not any external links.
A good starting point for an accessible website is using valid XHTML and CSS, following the standards set out by the W3C, but we understand that valid markup doesn't necessarily mean an accessible site.
We test our websites, and aim for standard presentation, using Internet Explorer, Firefox (a mozilla/gecko-based browser), Opera and Konqueror/Safari. Opera and Firefox both offer style-less and text-only views, and these are used to allow us to see our sites as a user of a text-based browser would. More recently, we became aware of the Fangs Firefox extension, that emulates the popular JAWS screen-reader, providing a transcript of what the user of a screen-reader will hear.
Links and Navigation
Links, when we consider it appropriate, contain additional information in their 'title' attributes. This appears as a tooltip in most modern browsers, while screen-readers can generally be setup to read this information.
The phrases which make up links are chosen in such a way that they should make sense independent of any context they appear in. The benefit of this, is that many screen-readers, and some browsers, allow for the listing of, and iteration through, all of the links within a page. Having links such as 'Click Here' will be meaningless in such a situation.
Links within this site will not open in new windows. If you wish to open a link in a separate window, to allow you to continue browsing the Severn Delta site, then Shift+Click will do this in most browsers.
As is normally the case with websites, the primary navigation is located at the top of the page. For users of screen readers though, we appreciate that waiting while the same information is read on every page is undesirable, and so there is a 'Skip Navigation' link as one of the first page-elements. Clicking this link (or pressing Enter in most screen-readers) will continue past the navigation and begin with the main page content.
Accesskeys are utilised within the site for commonly sought-after pages. For Windows and Linux users, the access-key is 'Alt', while on Macs it is 'Ctrl'. The defined access keys include the following:
access key 1 (Alt+1)- home page
access key 5 (Alt+5)- about us
access key 9 (Alt+9)- feedback
access key 0 [zero] (Alt+0)- accessibility statement
access key s (Alt+s)- skip navigation
These were decided upon after research into commonly used keys, in an attempt to remain consistent with other websites. For browsers that support it, the access-key is shown next to the link when it has focus (This uses the :focus and :after CSS pseudo-classes, which unfortunately Internet Explorer doesn't understand, but Firefox, Opera and Safari/Konqueror do).
For aesthetic purposes, the main navigation of this site uses switching menus, in order than the secondary-level of navigation can be viewed without having to load the page. In accordance with WAI guidelines, the events are device independent; they use the 'onfocus' event-handler, rather than relying solely on 'onmouseover' to determine when to perform the switch. This means, that for a javascript-enabled browser, using tab to cycle through the navigation will behave exactly the same as if a mouse were used. This required changing the 'tabindex' of the menu elements to reflect this tree-like structure, with the ordering following each branch to its end before moving to the next.
Presentation
Any standards-compliant browser should display this site as the designer intended, however the entirety of the content is accessible using any browser or other internet device.
Font sizes are specified in relative units, which means that increasing the browser's font size ('View' and then 'Text Size' in Internet Explorer and Firefox) will scale all text accordingly.
Acronyms and abbreviations are generally tagged accordingly, with explanations contained in the 'title' attribute. This is, by default, shown in browsers with a dotted underline, and holding the mouse over the element will display the meaning. Screen-readers can be setup to read the explanation as well as, or instead of, the abbreviation or acronym.
The presentation of the site is handled by stylesheets that allow for elegant design, without the 'clutter' of tables. There is a separate stylesheet for printing that removes the images, colours and navigation, that will be utilised automatically by modern browsers. As a last resort, every page in the site can be viewed as text-only, with only standard document formatting such as headings, paragraphs and links.
Images
The site uses no images that aren't purely for presentation, other than perhaps the logo, which is clearly identified with both 'alt' and 'title' attributes, that both text-based browsers and screen-readers can be set to understand.
This is the approach we try to take when developing client-websites, but in those rare instances where an image is used as content, then we follow the WAI guidelines, by providing 'alt', 'title' and 'longdesc' information where it is appropriate.
