Accessibility statement

This page outlines some of the techniques we have used to enhance the site’s accessibility, and explains how users can take advantage of these. If you have any questions or comments relating to accessibility, feel free to email us at online [at] nfsa [dot] gov [dot] au.

Standards compliance

1. All pages on this site are Web Content Accessibility Guidelines(WCAG) double A (AA) approved, complying wih all priority 1, and 2 guidelines of the World Wide Web Consortium(W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. This is a judgement call; many guidelines are intentionally vague and can not be tested automatically. We have reviewed all the guidelines and believe that all these pages are in compliance.
2. All pages on this site validate as HTML 4.01 Strict. This is not a judgement call; a program can determine with 100% accuracy whether a page is valid HTML.
3. All pages on this site use structured semantic markup. H1 tags are used for main titles, H2 tags for subtitles. For example, on this page, JAWS users can skip to the next section within the accessibility statement by pressing ALT+INSERT+2.

Navigation aids

1. All pages have rel=home, contents, search, help and accessibility links to aid navigation in text-only browsers. Individual clip pages also have rel=up links to aid navigation to the clip’s title page. Netscape 6 and Mozilla users can take advantage of this feature by selecting the View menu, Show/Hide, Site Navigation Bar, Show Only As Needed (or Show Always).
2. All pages include a search box.

Links

1. Many 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.

Video

1. All video clips are accompanied by descriptive text.
2. Video clips with education notes are accompanied by transcripts and/or close captions.
3. Video clips are displayed on pages using embedded Flash.
4. Where our content licenses allow it, video clips are also available as downloadable MPEG4 files. This allows you to play video clips while you browse.

Audio

1. All audio clips are accompanied by descriptive text and in most cases a transcript.
2. You can open the audio player in a separate window to allow you to continue browsing as you listen.

Images

1. Where images convey meaning not addressed by the adjacent descriptive text, we have used ALT attributes to provide a text alternative to the graphical content. Purely decorative graphics, and images with adjacent equivalent text or descriptive text, include null ALT attributes.

Visual design

1. This site uses cascading style sheets(CSS) 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 software

1. JAWS, a screen reader for Windows. A time-limited, downloadable demo is available.
2. Lynx, a free text-only web browser for blind users with refreshable Braille displays.
3. Links, a free text-only web browser for visual users with low bandwidth.
4. 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.

Acknowledgements

1. Thanks to Alex Robinson whose pioneering work In search of the One True Layout showed how to produce a multi-coloumn layout with destroying the logical structure of the underlying html.
2. Mark Pilgrim’s work Dive Into Accessibility provided a sound accessibility methodology, and a template for writing accessibility statements such as this one.