zetoc Website Accessibility Project

1. Aim

2. Methods

Every effort has been made to conform to accessibility standards. W3C guidelines and LIFT accessibility guidelines have been followed, except in instances where the guidelines do not take account of the specific context.

Accessibility checks were made using:

3. General changes

4. Record of accessibility and validation for individual pages

This section provides a record of the checks made for each indidivual page. It can be viewed either in the PDF or RTF version of this report

5. Actions

XHTML

Information pages checked with validator to conform to XHTML Transitional, with no errors
(http://validator.w3.org/)

We do not use a consistent markup language for the whole service, as the application uses HTML 4.01 transitional and the information pages use XHTML transitional. In the application pages, end tags for <li>, <th> and <td> are often omitted. This is acceptable in HTML, but not in XHTML.

Browser accessibility checks

Colours, colour contrast, colour blindness, font styles, font sizes, stylesheet off, linearized, resolution

Browsers used for checking

IE5, 5.5, Netscape 4.08; Netscape 6.2; Nescape 3; Opera 6.2; HomePage Reader (see below), Lynx (without images)

Home Page Reader (audio browser)

HPR has been used to navigate around zetoc and to set up an alert. There are problems using HPR to access the full text article (via the OpenURL Resolver). This issue has not been further investigated in this project.

Layout tables

Layout table tags replaced with div tags to position a left-hand menu and then position the main body text (using floatmenu, floatitem, bodytext)

Frames

Frames are titled and a non frames version is available.

Metadata

Full Dublin Core metadata included, with subject and description included on most pages.
Page created date and page updated date used. Contributor used for last person editing the page.
Entries changed to lower case in line with new guidelines.

Other

Skip used for menu items, with one pixel image used to jump to content
Acronym tags have been added.
Link text is not used for different URL’s on the same page.

Images

6. Outstanding actions and issues

Adjacent links

In order to fulfil WAI Guideline 10.5 (Priority 3), adjacent links should be rendered distinctly, including non-link, printable characters (surrounded by spaces) between adjacent links.

This can be done by making menu items a list, and specifying that the bullets are not displayed in the stylesheet. There are problems displaying this in different browsers.

Borders

The border tag remains for the one pixel image used in skip. This is because Netscape 4 does not recognise the noborder attribute in a stylesheet.

Scripts should have noscript tags (P1)

Javascript is only used for the onmouseover attribute, which provides extra display features, but does not add to the functionality. The navigation and functionality within zetoc does not require javascript. There are no accessibility issues associated with using scripts, programmic objects, applets, etc.
Noscript tags could be added, but in this instance they are not really necessary.

Headers for zetoc full record page should be <th> tags (P1)

Field names so that they are identified as headers. This would make them bold, though they could be changed to non bold by using the stylesheet. We do have markup to associate headers with rows.

Properly nested headings (P2)

Strictly speaking, zetoc should use H1, H2 and H3 in hierarchy. There are some pages where the main heading is H1 and sub-heading is H3, but it should be H2

Pop up windows (P2)

We still have a pop up window for the zetoc alert help page whereas others are not. Guidelines state that pop up windows should not be used, and though sometimes they may be useful, here they are not necessary.

Jane Stevenson
Jan 2003
updated May 2003; June 2004