Access keys
Most browsers support jumping to specific links by typing keys defined on the web site. On Windows, you can press ALT + an access key; on Macintosh, you can press CTRL + an access key. The following access keys are available throughout clagnut:
| Access key | Target |
|---|---|
| 1 | Home page |
| 2 | Skip navigation |
| 4 | Search |
| 9 | Contact |
| 0 | Access key details |
Standards compliance
All pages comply with priority 1 guidelines of the W3 Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and the U.S. Federal Government Section 508 Guidelines.
All pages validate as XHTML 1 Transitional. They use structured semantic markup. For example, on the home page H2 tags are used for blog post titles. In particular, this enables JAWS users to skip to the next post using ALT+INSERT+2.
Navigation aids
All archive pages have rel=previous, next, and home links to aid navigation in text-only browsers and screen readers. Mozilla users can also take advantage of this feature by selecting the View menu, Show/Hide, Site Navigation Bar, Show Only As Needed (or Show Always). Opera 7 has similar functionality.
All tables have properly scoped header cells, to allow screen readers to render them intelligently. Where required, tables also have a caption and a summary.
Links
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).
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. To aid this, link text is never duplicated; two links with the same link text always point to the same address.
There are no javascript: pseudo-links. All links can be followed in any browser, even if scripting is turned off. There are no links that open new windows without warning.
Visual design
This site use cascading style sheets for visual layout. If your browser or browsing device does not support stylesheets at all, the content of each page is still readable. The site works surprisingly well as an AvantGo channel (for PDAs) with no extra work or pre-processing.
The layout is completely liquid, simply filling its viewport (window). It happily accommodates resizing text and, as relative units have been used, text can even be re-sized in Internet Explorer for Windows.
More Help With Accessibility
Much of this was adapted from Mark Pilgrim’s Dive Into Mark. Mark also wrote Dive Into Accessibility, an excellent resource explaining all the issues dealt with on this page.
