zetoc Website Accessibility Project
1. Aim
- To make all information pages AA accessible, and if possible AAA accessible
- To make all information pages pages xhtml transitional
- To document any problems in implimenting accessibility
- To document outstanding actions
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:
- Dreamweaver
- LIFT (in Dreamweaver)
- Bobby
- W3C html validation tool
- Homepage Reader audio browser
- Various versions of Internet Explorer and Netscape as well as Opera
and Lynx browsers
- General experience and various internet resources
3. General changes
- All pages have a Doctype declaration, namespace and language declaration
- Full Dublin Core metadata has been included
- Layout tables have been replaced with div tags in order to separate
content and presentation<
- Skip tags have been used for the main menu
- All presentation tags removed and stylesheet used
- Headings have been properly used and nested correctly
- The navigation bar and trailer are now ‘includes’, for
ease of updating
- Tags such as acronym, title and name tags have been included where
appropriate
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
- Alt tag used
- No longdesc currently used (not necessary), one D link for stats
graph
- Border tag replaced with stylesheet attribute for images, but still
used for skip (problem viewing in Netscape 4) – should eventually replace
this
- For Netscape 4, needed to use a float for the zetoc image so that
the headers aligned correctly (to the left of the image rather than underneath)
- Image sizes given
- Width and height attributes have been introduced for the images linking
to search and alert (width=109, height=84).
- Netscape 4.08 and Opera joined the images for search and alert together
this has been resolved by putting a transparent border around the
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