If you have any questions or comments, feel free to email me at webmaster@cornwall.ac.uk.

Standards compliance

  1. All pages on this site is WCAG AAA approved, complying with priority 1, 2 and 3 guidelines by passing the automatic checkpoints of the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Although there are still some manual warnings, they have been reviewed thoroughly and the recommendations have been implemented therefore I believe that all these pages are in compliance. Work is currently being carried out to reduce the amount of manual warnings to a minimum.
  2. All pages on this site are Section 508 approved, complying with all of the U.S. Federal Government Section 508 Guidelines. Again, a judgement call. I have reviewed all the guidelines and believe that all these pages are in compliance.
  3. 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. By providing a referring link it is possible to show the results of the validation for this page.

Links

  1. Most 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. The site does not rely solely on images to convey information and the site can be navigated with images turned off in the browser.

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.

Related resources

  1. The template for this accessibility statement was kindly donated by Dive Into Accessibility.
  2. WebAIM, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving accessibility to online learning materials.
  3. Designing More Usable Web Sites, a large list of additional resources.

Recommended Reading

  1. Joe Clark: Building Accessible Websites. Comprehensive but not overwhelming.
  2. Jim Thatcher and others: Constructing Accessible Web Sites. Less comprehensive than Joe’s book, but goes into greater depth in the topics it covers. Gives screenshots of how various screen readers and alternative browsers interpret various tags and markup. Also has an amazing chapter on the current state of legal accessibility requirements.