Accessibility

Commitment to accessibility

I am committed to the content of this website being accessible to all. If you encounter any difficulty in accessing the material on any page, please do not hesistate to contact me, explaining the problem. Every effort will be made to provide a remedy.

Compliance with web standards

Web standards are technologies established by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) designed to future-proof documents published on the Web and to make those documents accessible to as many people as possible.

W3C publishes a checklist with checkpoints for accessibility. This checklist is the basis of most national and international legislation and recommendations on accessibility. This website satisfies the most important checkpoints. All pages are valid (semantic) XHTML 1.0 (Transitional), one of the publishing languages of the World Wide Web.

Design and layout

Presentation is controlled entirely by style sheets. A style sheet is a separate document from the web page itself. Nowadays it's considered good practice to separate style from structure to make web pages more accessible.

Of course, this website looks its best in a modern, graphical web browser, but the content should be readable and usable even for text-based browsers and older graphical browsers. The pages have been tested by a third party using voice recognition software which enables hands-free screen navigation and data entry via spoken instruction, and found to operate effectively.

Older graphical browsers with insufficient support for style sheets get the pages without any graphic layout, but the content is the same.

All text on this website is specified in such a way that if you select a larger size (for instance in the 'View' menu in Internet Explorer) the text size is guaranteed to increase up to two size increases without causing page layout breakup or other display problems.

Site navigation

Navigation throughout this website is logical, simple, and consistent, even when viewed in a text-only browser.

Links to pages within this website and to other websites do not cause pop-ups or other windows to appear.

The use of access keys on websites is somewhat controversial, and have not been used.

Images

All images that convey information have a text equivalent and, if needed, also a separate description. The exceptions are images used for purely decorative purposes. The smallest image file sizes consistent with optimal display quality have been provided.

In addition, this website remains fully accessible to visitors whose browsers have images turned off.

Scripts

All pages work even with browsers which don't support client-side scripting, or where this has been disabled. The few existing scripts provide some kind of added value, but they are in no way critical.

Printing pages

All pages are 'print-friendly'. A print-only style ensures that irrelevant content, colours, backgrounds etc do not print, and that all content is served in logical order in a single column using Times New Roman.

[ First published February 22nd, 2006 ]