REEP - Accessibility

REEP Site Accessibility

Efforts have been made to ensure that the information on this site is accessible to as many visitors as possible:

Keyboard Shortcuts

The following keyboard shortcuts are implemented:

1: REEP Home Page.
2: Skip past the page navigation menus to the main page content.

The keyboard combinations for invoking these shortcuts vary between browsers and operating systems; Please see your browser help pages for details.

If you find that the text is not displayed at a comfortable size, most browsers allow you to change the text size. Generally, the text size option is an option in the 'View' menu and there are often keyboard shortcuts (e.g. 'CTRL' & 'plus' to increase the size). The exact controls vary according to the browser and operating system, so please see your browser help pages for details.

Page Display Styles

This site uses CSS to control the page display. If your browser does not support CSS, or you prefer to view the pages without the styling, the content will still be accessible.

A different style sheet is used when printing so that the site navigation and some graphic elements are not printed (which saves both ink and space on the page).

Valid Markup

We strive to ensure that pages are coded with valid, and semantic, HTML and CSS. Some older pages on the site may not reflect these current standards, but they are gradually being updated.

About Web Standards

The World Wide Web (www) was invented by Tim Berners-Lee as a common space where users could share information. For the information to be shared, it needs to be in a certain format so that the software used to view it knows how to process and display it. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the organisation that develops the standards used for web pages.

The internet is now a global network and many organisations around the world create software designed to create or view content on the web. Until recently many browsers interpreted HTML in differing ways or supported code specific to a particular browser or platform. Web designers found it difficult to ensure that visitors saw the sites as they were intended.

To ensure that content is available regardless of the software used, standard web code has been developed. HyperText Markup Language (HTML) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are the two main standards relating to web content.

Why Use Web Standards?

Using standard code to create web pages ensures that pages will display properly in standards-compliant browser software, regardless of the platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) or the device (PC, Palm, NetTV). In addition, standards-compliant sites should be viewable in the future without breaking when non-standard code is no longer supported by a certain browser or device. However, one of the most important reasons to use standards is accessibility.

Accessibility

The internet is a powerful means of communication and a valuable source of information, but only if it is accessible. Many sites are not easily accessible to handicapped users and so the information is not readily available to them. This is not just an inconvenience to those users, nor simply an unethical exclusion of one part of the population; Several countries have enacted legislation requiring that web sites be accessible to handicapped users.

By using standard (X)HTML and CSS code, the page's content and layout code are separated. Firstly, this means that screen-reader software that reads aloud the content of web pages does not have to wade through dozens of lines of HTML to find the content. Secondly, the layout specified by the designer can be overridden to make the pages easier to view - for example many browsers allow the user to change the text size or colour to their preferred settings.

Other Advantages

If you have ever wanted to print out the text on a web page and found the resulting print-out contains numerous unwanted images (using more ink) and is too wide to fit on an A4 page, CSS provides a solution.

Different style sheets can be specified for each medium used to view the document - one for viewing the pages on a screen and another for printing the pages. By specifying which elements on the page should print and in what format, a 'printer-friendly' page can be derived from the web page. For example, if you print this page, the menu and header graphic do not print out and the text is re-flowed to fit the paper.

Last, but not least, pages containing only content, and not layout code, are generally smaller than non-standards compliant pages and load more quickly.

What Does That Mean For Me?

If you arrived at this page because your browser does not support web standards, we would encourage you to upgrade. Standards-compliant browser software is now available for most platforms (see the list on the 'Web Standards Project' site, below). However we appreciate that this is not always possible and that, in some organisations, the choice of software is not made by the user. That is why we have tried to ensure that the content remains accessible to non-standards compliant browsers, even if it isn't very pretty.

Converting a site to standards-compliant code is a gradual process, and while new pages will almost certainly adopt this format, it may be a while before all of the site, especially some older pages, are updated.

We appreciate your feedback about the site. If you are experiencing difficulty viewing any part of the site, please contact us.

Find Out More

See the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for technical details of the web standards, or
The Web Standards Project for a more user-friendly explanation of web standards.