Accessibility
Why does our site need to be accessible? An accessible website has a huge number of advantages – Blind users may utilise a screen reader which uses speech synthesis to read out a web site’s content, valid and semantic XHTML design means that this will work the way that the software intends. Partially sighted visitors will need to increase the size of the text on your website and valid CSS design will be needed to allow this to happen. Deaf visitors and those with no mouse access along with web users with Colour Blindness and even Epilepsy are also considered.
People with mobility issues may be unable to control a mouse to click on links. The W3C introduced the accesskey attribute to enable users to select the appropriate key on their keyboards and navigate to a particular link. Able-bodied users can find them equally useful as shortcuts, too.
The accesskey attribute is currently supported by the following web browsers; Internet Explorer 4+ (Windows) & 5+ (Mac), Mozilla (Windows + Linux), Netscape 6+ (Windows) and Opera 7 (Windows + Linux). Windows users can navigate with the accesskey feature by typing ‘ALT’‘Accesskey’ and Mac users can use ‘CTRL’‘Accesskey’. The site uses semantically correct mark-up (the correct tag for the correct purpose), text size can be increased via your browser and wherever Flash and Javascript are used, measures have been put in place to ensure that viewers without Flash 7 or with Javascript disabled will still be able to use the site to it’s full potential.