This website has been designed to be easy to use and to be accessible to as many people as possible. This page describes some of the features that we have built in to achieve this. You will also find links to other useful resources about accessibility elsewhere on the World Wide Web. This page contains the following sections:
RNID promotes accessible and usable web design. We hope these pages are an illustration of best practice in this field. We appreciate any comments on accessibility and usability aspects of these pages.
Some browsers support jumping to certain pages by pressing key combinations. All pages on this site define the following access keys:
Different browsers use different key combinations to activate access keys, so please look in your browser's help file for the right combination. For example, in Mozilla Firefox 2, you use the alt+shift keys in combination with the access key. Some older browsers do not support access keys at all.
We have done our best to make this site as easy to navigate as possible, including for use in text-only browsers or via screen readers:
All images on this site have an alternative text (ALT) attribute that describes the contents or function of the image in a meaningful way. This description will be displayed when images are turned off or in a text-only browser. Certain browsers display the alternative text as a "tool tip" when moving the mouse over the image.
Most of the content on this site is in xhtml and designed to be fully accessible. Some documents are available in both xhtml and another format. A few documents are not (yet) available in xhtml. Some of the document formats we use are:
Some legacy documents are only available in one of these formats. It is our intention to gradually migrate all those documents so that they are always available as web pages in addition to the more proprietary and sometimes less accessible document formats described above.
This site uses style sheets for layout (see also "Use of Open Standards" below). All the content remains readable and the structure remains logical even when style sheets are not used by your browser. Sizing and positioning information is mostly relative, allowing users to change the font size according to their own preference. Where colour is used, we have selected the colours from a browser-safe colour palette and we have chosen background and foreground combinations for good contrast. We have tested all the pages for readibility by people with colour-blindness.
All pages on this site validate as XHTML 1.0 Strict. This site also use cascading style sheets, level 2 for visual layout. The style sheets are also fully compliant and will validate. This is not a subjective judgement call, rather can be tested objectively by using validator tools. By offering well-structured and valid content, the information on this page will render correctly in any compliant browser. It also enables search engines to analyse these pages correctly and index them accordingly. Finally, by offering well-structured content, users of specialised access software and/or hardware will be better able to use these pages.