What is accessibility?Accessibility can be thought of as "providing access regardless of the situation or circumstances." In the context of the World Wide Web, accessibility is a measure of how easy it is to access, read, and understand the content of a web site, especially for those with visual, hearing, cognitive or motor impairments. Accessibility is complicated by the fact that a web site is not a published piece of work so much as a living document that can be interpreted in different ways by different browsers and on different platforms. The Web is not a print medium - although sites are most often read in a visual manner, there are many different ways a Web page can be experienced, such as via a speech browser or an indexing robot. The bottom line is that making web sites "accessible" means that everyone, including people with disabilities, can use the Web. What does this mean to me?At Look & Feel we take very seriously the accessibility of the web sites we develop. Our aim is to make them easily accessible to as many people as possible - as easily as possible! We have gone to great lengths to ensure the Francesca Jackson web site complies as far as possible with the latest guidelines and highest standards laid down by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the industry governing body for the Web. For example, the site is coded in XHTML (the very latest version of HTML) and uses Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to control the layout, typeface and font sizes that make up the design. All the scripts that control the online art galleries and slideshows are painstakingly checked to make sure they are 100% correct. Finally, every page is individually checked using W3C's online verification tools to make sure there is nothing in any of the pages that will cause problems in today's web browsers. (Click on the icons at the bottom of the page to see typical verification results.) However, this is only part of the story. W3C's commitment to lead the Web to its full potential includes the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). One of the roles of the WAI is to develop guidelines and techniques that describe accessibility solutions for Web software and Web developers. These WAI guidelines are considered the international standard for Web accessibility. The Francesca Jackson web site complies as fully as possible with the WAI's Priority 1 checkpoints. It also complies with many of the more specific Priority 2 and 3 checkpoints. This means the site is designed with those who find using web sites more difficult, perhaps because they are partially sighted, in mind, without compromising any of our design standards. Looking ahead...Making web sites as easy to use and accessible for as many people as possible is an ongoing task as Internet technologies change. Look & Feel continually appraises all its web sites, including the Francesca Jackson site, to gauge how accessible they are and to make improvements in as many ways as possible. If you have any questions about the accessibility or usability of this web site, or any suggestions, please get in touch - either use the contact form or send us an email. Use the links below for further guidance and site information: More information on the accessibility of this web siteText-sizeThe size of the text shown on the site has been picked to be the most readable and appealing for the majority of our users. Some of you however will wish to enlarge (or decrease) the text to their own chosen size. Most web browsers will have a menu at the top of the screen entitled "View", where there will usually be an option titled "Text zoom", "Text size", "Make text bigger" etc. This should give you control over the text size on the page. NoteIf you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer as your browser on a PC running Windows, then this option may not have any effect. This browser also has a number of ongoing issues which prevent it from complying fully with the W3C and WAI standards. If you are using this browser, we strongly recommend that you download an alternative browser of which there are many, and almost all of which are free. In addition, many of these alternative browsers include a variety of features which can aid those with visual impairment. We have included some links below. Browsers available to download online include:
Look & Feel Web site: www.lookandfeel.uk.com This page was last updated January 2008 |
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