ACCESSIBILITY

Overview

Design Scotland take the issue of web accessibility seriously and have undertaken to adhere to the current WAI/W3C standards wherever possible. As a caveat, the basic business premise of Design Scotland is of visual design for videography and as such requires the display of live video excerpts via it's web pages. This may provide an issue for visually impaired visitors which we can only apologise for, the undertaking of large scale video demonstration downloads would be prohibitively expensive at both bandwidth and performance levels. To address this issue evenly, we are very keen to offer our services to ALL our web visitors, so should you have a need to view any of our demos in a large scale format, we will be happy to mail a CD copy of our demonstration videos to any requestors.

Links

1. Many links have title attributes which describe the link in greater detail, unless the text of the link already fully describes the target (such as the headline of an article).
2. Whenever possible, links are written to make sense out of context. Many browsers (such as JAWS, Home Page Reader, Lynx, and Opera) can extract the list of links on a page and allow the user to browse the list, separately from the page.
3. There are no links that open popup windows without warning, there is a single link to a venues page which resides on an disparate server-this page is opened using the _blank target attribute and will not be affected by popup blockers or XP SP2 patch upgrades.

Images

1. All content images used in the home page and all archives include descriptive ALT attributes. Purely decorative graphics include null ALT attributes or are not addressed.

Visual design

This site uses cascading style sheets and javascript DHTML menus for visual layout.

1. Internet Explorer has a limited text resizing feature ("View" menu, "Text Size"), but it only works with relative font sizes. A special stylesheet that uses relative font sizes is automatically served to visitors using Internet Explorer.
2. If your browser or browsing device does not support stylesheets at all, the content of each page is still readable.
3. A series of generalised links are available at the foot of every page to offer an alternative to key resources

Accessibility references

1. W3 accessibility guidelines, which explains the reasons behind each guideline.
2. W3 accessibility techniques, which explains how to implement each guideline.
3. W3 accessibility checklist, a busy developer's guide to accessibility.
4. U.S. Federal Government Section 508 accessibility guidelines.

Accessibility software and services

1. Bobby, a free service to analyze web pages for compliance to accessibility guidelines.
2. HTML Validator, a free service for checking that web pages conform to published HTML standards.
3. Web Page Backward Compatibility Viewer, a tool for viewing your web pages without a variety of modern browser features.
4. JAWS, a screen reader for Windows. A time-limited demo is available.
5. Lynx, a free text-only web browser.