Accessibility
What are our aims for this website?
We aim to make our websites accessible by all including those with visual impairment. We also aim to use methods of building the websites and maintaining the content that are simple and manageable by non-expert volunteers.
We use Open Source software and international standards for two reasons. Firstly, we are charity and our volunteers and donors expect us to minimise costs wherever appropriate and secondly, the open source organisations are leaders in this area of expertise.
What we have done on this site
Text size
The pages use re-sizable text throughout so that you can control how large the text is on your screen. We have laid out the pages so that you can adjust the width of the text columns to suit how you prefer to read; many people prefer to read with narrow columns.
To adjust the column width simply make your browser window narrower. Making the text larger has a similar effect
Colours
The colours of text and background colours of the FAST "house style" can be over-ridden by users' browser settings in two ways. Firstly, we have provided two styles - the "base" one which is uses the FAST colour scheme and a "high contrast" alternative which leading browsers allow you to select. This can be useful if high contrast suits your eyesight.
The second method is more specialist and with it you can have a local colour scheme meeting your exact needs, for example, white letters on black.
None of the text you need to understand the site is in the form of graphics that cannot be changed in size or colour; as a consequence our site looks plainer than some you will see but that is a deliberate policy choice.
Text and "screen reader" Browsers
We have structured the site so that if you use a text-only browser (e.g. Lynx) you will not struggle to make sense of what belongs to what. You do not have to scroll through less important material to reach what you want. We have also tried hard to include the labels and summaries which, although are normally hidden, are very helpful in allowing "screen readers" (these are utilities that read the text out to the user with a speech synthesizer e.g. Gnopernicus) to make sense of photos, tables etc.
Hints and tips
For larger text:
- Firefox - hold down Control and press +
- IE 6 - hold down control and scroll your mouse wheel
- IE 7 - go to View, Text Size in the menu bar and select "larger" or "largest". Do not use the mouse wheel method - in IE7 that means zoom the screen and it applies a horizontal scroll bar instead of adjusting the text column widths
For high contrast: Firefox - go to "style" in the "view" menu and choose the high contrast alternative page style.
Why not download Firefox? - it is free and is the front runner for accessibility.
Our Development Strategy
Internet Standards
Our strategy is to develop this site using a standards-compliant browser (we use Firefox 2.0) and to do what we can to deliver good results with other browsers. We are sorry that we do not have the resources to go beyond using compliant css and html. We do not intend to use browser-specific "fixes" because of the significant cost in development and maintenance (although, most commercial sites do this). Consequently our site may look less good with older browsers but it will still be usable.
Internet Explorer 6 (IE6)
Our preferred design, in which all three columns are adjustable in width to give maximum flexibility to those who prefer larger text and narrow columns does not work well with IE6. IE6 is not standards-compliant and presents the navigation box of this design with less usability than we would like. However, IE6 is used by about half of our site's visitors and we have therefore chosen a compromise with a fixed-width navigation. With it we can work around the non-compliant behaviour of IE6 and make the links work in a standard way. (see technical note below)
Our users of Safari, Opera and Konqueror should have no problems and we would ask the very small number of IE5 and Netscape 4 users to enjoy the content and accept our apologies where there are shortcomings in the appearance.
Technical Note - help welcome
Note on IE6 - Following our strategy not using "hacks" has the result that we have to use fixed width links in our navigation boxes to turn on the Microsoft proprietary feature of " hasLayout = "true" ". If we do not do this, only the text in the navigation boxes is sensitive to the mouse hovering; not the whole box as it should be.
We would prefer to use a variable width navigation and we would be grateful if anyone is able to volunteer a solution (that does not use fixed width or fixed height, both of which spoil it for users wanting very large text, or adding an image element, which spoils it for screen reader users).
We would value your comments
Please let us know how we have done. If there is anything that needs improving or if our ideas of what would be useful are not as good as we think, point it out and we will do our best to fix it.
Registered Charity 1040199
http://www.farnboroughairsciences.org.uk
Version: 1.02 date: 21 May 2007