Accessibility information

Developing for accessibility involves many judgement calls, and I value practical feedback — if you have any problems with this site, or find any areas which are difficult or impossible to access or use, please do let me know.

Page Semantics

All the content on this website is properly structured into headings, paragraphs and other meaningful HTML semantics. If your browser or reader has a headings-reading mode or equivalent, you can use this to skip through the major sections of any page.

Groups of related links are generally organised into lists, and content which falls easily into name/value pairs is generally marked up using definition-lists.

Page Text

If you find that the text is too small for you to read, you can change it to a size you're more comfortable with:

• In Opera, use the Zoom selector.
• In Firefox and other Mozilla browsers, use the View - Increase Text Size option.
• In Safari, use the View - Make Text Bigger option.
• In Macintosh Internet Explorer, and Netscape 6 and 7, use the View - Text Zoom menu.
• In Windows Internet Explorer (including Pocket IE), use the View - Text Size menu.

If you use a wheel-mouse, you may be able to change the text size by holding down the Control or Command key and turning the wheel. In some browsers you can change the text size using Control or Command and the + and - keys.

Page Styles

All the visual styling on this website is implemented using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), so that you can override some or all of the sites appearance with your own user stylesheets.

The site also features a stylesheet switcher, from where you can choose from a range of design and access-oriented stylesheets, and even specify your own colour scheme:

1. The Design choices feature the default, soft green and yellow design [default], and then a version of that design with a simulated red/green colour deficiency [deuteranopic]; or for those who like something a little sharper, there's an inverted purple on very-dark blue [inverted].
2. The High contrast stylesheets implement a simple two-tone colour scheme for maximum readability; there are two presets [yellow on black, black on yellow] or you can specify your own custom foreground and background colours, implementing whatever colour combination you find easiest to read [anything from forest-green to charcoal-blue to shades of dusty-pink]
3. The Minimal styling options allow you apply no colours or fonts at all while preserving the physical layout [no colours or fonts]; this is so that your browser's accessibility preferences can show through, but without losing the formatting of columns and boxes. Or you can remove the stylesheets altogether, and fall-back on your browser's native rendering [no stylesheets].

For all the different design schemes you can further choose from a two-column layout with the column on the left or right [left, right], or you can switch to a single-column zoom layout [zoom layout]; the zoom layout may be useful if you browse with very large text, since a single column gives more room for scaling without creating horizontal scrollbars.

(And just in case you need it, here's a handy link to restore the default styles)