Accessibility statement for www.stx.ox.ac.uk
How these pages are generated
The pages on this site are produced by the Open Source content management system Drupal (http://drupal.org/), based on the PHP language and a MySQL database. Content generated by Drupal core modules is rendered by page templates that create XHTML 1.0 strict. However, certain contributed modules for forms, image handling or calendar generation, generate html code that may not successfully validate as XHTML 1.0 strict or adhere strictly to accessibility guidelines, and until such time as these can be corrected, we note these exceptions below. Authored content (provided by a team of College officers) is created in an editor that forces strict XHTML output, and would normally validate successfully.
For further information, please contact the Webmaster.
Navigation
- All pages include a search box, and a more advanced search page is provided.
- An expanding, nested side menu is provided across all of the site. Many sections of the site also have links of the previous/up/next style at the page foot (some non-graphical browsers also display these at the top of the page), and some have alternative or deeper navigation links in the right side-bar.
- A breadcrumb trail has been provided across the site to show the section and page the user is on within the site.
- There is an automatically generated site map.
- Our authoring policy is to use the "title" attribute on links to describe the target page, as well as to ensure that, wherever possible, links are written to make sense out of context. With the exception of pages containing lists of articles with summaries (where the duplicated link "read more" relates to the immediately preceding article), link text is not duplicated, and two links with the same link text always point to the same target page.
- There are no "javascript:" pseudo-links. All links can be followed in any browser, even if scripting is turned off.
- There are no internal links that open new windows. We are still developing our policy on links to external sites.
- Tables in the page content have a summary and, unless they are perfectly intelligible in linearised form, properly scoped header cells to allow screen readers to render them intelligently.
Images
All content images used include descriptive "alt" attributes. Purely decorative graphics include null "alt" attributes.
Visual design
- The site layout involves two fixed and one scalable column beneath a header. Because user agents do not consistently support such a layout with CSS alone, the side-bars and main content are contained within a table. However, the table content is readable in a logical sequence (site navigation, main content, further links) when linearised, such as in text-only browsers.
- Background, text and link colours are controlled within the stylesheet and therefore may be overriden by altering your browser settings.
- This site uses relative font sizes, compatible with the user-specified "text size" option in visual browsers. For example, if you are using Internet Explorer, you can make your default text size larger under the "View" menu, "Text Size", "Larger" (or "Largest").
- If your browser or browsing device does not support stylesheets at all, the content of each page is still readable in a logical sequence.
Our conformance claim for this site
Pages should validate as XHTML 1.0 Strict, except where noted below. The templates use Cascading Style Sheets which can be read by CSS-P compliant and non-compliant browsers. These pages meet the checkpoints of the Web Accessibility Initiative's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, as specified by the University of Oxford Web Accessibility Policy to Level-A standards, as well as Levels AA and AAA where possible. All pages use structured semantic markup. The numbered statements below relate to specific WCAG checkpoints.
5.1 We have chosen not to use some of the available XHTML table mark-up features, as we have tried to keep table layouts simple. We have therefore used "scope" rather than "id" and "headers" on most of our tables.
Where Level-AA has not been met
- 12.4 The search input field on each page, and certain other input fields on the advanced search page, fail to satisfy this checkpoint by not having label elements explicitly associated in html code with the form text field. We hope to rectify this.
- 13.1 Although our authoring policy is to use the title attribute on links, and to use self-explanatory link text, we cannot guarantee at this time that all links are thus enhanced.
- 13.1 Automated pages containing lists of articles with summaries may fail an accessibility test because the same link text is used for different targets: currently each article summary is followed by a link "read more" with the same title "Read the rest of this posting". We shall attempt to address this issue.
Where we have chosen not to meet Level-AA at present
- 5.3 We have used a table for the main page layout, which has two fixed and one scalable column, in order to achieve consistent behaviour among different browsers. The table content is intelligible to the user when linearised (such as in text-only browsers).
Where Level-AAA has not been met
- 5.5 At present the machine-generated main layout table and events calendar tables do not have summaries.
- 10.5 Most navigation links are marked up as unordered lists, but we are aware of certain instances where sets of automatically-generated inline links are not separated by viewable or printable characters, and we shall attempt to rectify these.
- 13.6 Grouping related links has not been followed (for example, by using the "map" attribute).
Where we have chosen not to meet Level-AAA at present
- 9.4 We have chosen not to explicitly establish a tab order using the "tabindex" attribute.
- 9.5 We have chosen not to employ access keys. Research suggests that these can sometimes conflict with shortcut keys used by assistive technologies.
- 10.4 We have chosen to leave text boxes (such as in "search") blank.
