- guardian.co.uk, Monday 9 July 2007 17.30 BST
In order to make this site accessible to a wide audience we have worked closely with disability consultants the Shaw Trust. We have placed great emphasis on testing with people to ensure a better experience for all users and all technologies.
However we welcome any comments, suggestions or feedback you have for us, please feel free to contact us.
Contents
1. Design update
2. Text resizing
3. Access keys
4. User commenting
5. Recent site improvements
6. Talking Newspapers
Design update
We have spent the last 2 years introducing a new design for guardian.co.uk, taking care to ensure improved accessibility. This design has now been applied to the majority of pages, however some still remain such as User registration / sign-in and these will not yet have the same level of accessibility or some of the features listed below.
Text resizing
This can be activated through the 'Text larger / smaller' links at the top of the page. When the text size reaches 20px a new wide layout is triggered ensuring that the layout is not compromised. (Please note, our text resizing feature is dependent on javascript being turned on.)
Where our text resizing feature is not available, you can achieve the same result independently by following these instructions:
• PC / Internet Explorer 6 From the top menu bar, select View and point to Text size
• PC / Internet Explorer 7 From the menu bar underneath the search field, select Page and point to Text size
• PC / other browsers Increase text size: Hold down the CTRL key and press + Decrease text size: Hold down the CTRL key and press -
• Mac / all browsers Increase text size: Hold down the Command key and press + Decrease text size: Hold down the Command key and press -
Access keys
These can be accessed in the following way:
• PC: hold down Alt
• Mac: hold down Ctrl
• Firefox 2: hold down Alt and Shift
Then press one of the keys listed below:
's' to jump to the content
'0' to jump to the site navigation
'4' to jump to the site search
'8' to see our terms and conditions
'c' to jump to the comments (where comments are available).
User commenting
To access some of the community features on the site you need to have Javascript switched on and the following items should serve to further help users in this area:
• Access key 'c' (as mentioned in the section above) has been added to provide a link that moves the user directly to the start of the comments.
• RSS feeds of comments are available so you can view them using an RSS reader, such as Google Reader.
• We have ensured that the text resizing code and other features work with the comments.
• Comments are keyboard navigable.
We are in the process of drawing up a thorough test plan for Shaw Trust and will hopefully be able to improve this area in future. Further improvement to accessibility by creating a no-script version of the comments is on our roadmap - we have produced some internal prototypes that show how this could be done using our partner's API - but we do not have a release date for this yet.
Recent site improvements
1. Sliding caption column: changed heading colour to a monochrome scheme to improve readability.
2. Mp3 downloads: added a title attribute to the "Download mp3" link to include the heading of the file.
3. Global: increased colour contrast of text within the "Latest news on guardian.co.uk" component.
4. Breaking news ticker: lowered its CPU usage and removed the iframe, making it easier to access for users browsing with a keyboard or any assistive technology.
National Talking Newspapers
National Talking Newspapers offers Guardian content in a range of audio and full-text formats. Subscriptions are flexible and subscribers can change their choices during their subscription period. CDs and tapes and delivered freepost if the recipient is visually impaired.
More information is available on their website. If you have further queries, please contact National Talking Newspapers' customer services on 01435 866102 or email info@tnauk.org.uk.
