Accessibility

Colours

Hantsfire uses the web-safe colour palette for text, hyperlinks and background colours.

Frames

While the leading screen readers can handle frames, a frame-based site is more complex and thus more difficult to navigate in a non-graphical browser. For this reason, Hantsfire does not use frames.

Markup and Style Sheets

Using markup improperly hinders accessibility. Misusing markup for a presentation effect, eg using a table for layout or a header to change the font size) makes it difficult for users with specialised software to understand the organisation of the page or to navigate through it. Hantsfire strives to make every web page with valid mark up and controls presentation with style sheets rather than with presentation elements and attributes.
Hantsfire has been built to be compliant with XHTML 1.0 strict.
The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) validates as CSS 2.0.
Hantsfire strives to be compliant with the W3C web content accessibility guidelines.

Text and Images

Access to written information can be difficult for people who have cognitive or learning disabilities. Using clear and simple language also benefits people whose first language is not English. Hantsfire strives to use clear and simple language to promote effective communication.
If colour alone is used to convey information, people who cannot differentiate between certain colours and users with devices that have non-colour or non-visual displays will not receive the information. Hantsfire's pages are designed to take account of this.
Large graphic menus impose long loading times for pages, especially for users linking to the internet via modems or slow network connections. Hantsfire's graphic areas are moderately sized so that pages load reasonably quickly. We also endeavour to ensure that the size of 'downloadable' documents, such as Word and Adobe Acrobat, are not more than 500 kb.
Many web users choose not to load graphics and thus will not see menu links embedded in imagemap graphics. Hantsfire provides alternative text-based links for all links embedded in imagemaps.

Printing

When printing web content words are often lost from each line of text at the right margin, Hantsfire pages have been designed to print properly so that its visitors may read them more comfortably.

Site Layout

Hantsfire's layout takes into account users who are visually impaired or have difficulties using a mouse, it is fully compatible with popular screen reading software, and can be easily navigated using just a keyboard. Visitors to Hantsfire can use UK Government access keys to navigate comment elements of the site