Interactive pages

Many pages on this site, like this one, are divided into sections. Our accessible interactive technique enables browsers with JavaScript to show and hide these sections, reducing the need for sighted users to scroll. The whole content is downloaded in one go, and the interactive features can be turned on and off as you wish. Browsers without JavaScript automatically display all the text.

Move your mouse over the links in the "On this page..." section to quickly preview all the sections. If you use the keyboard to navigate, the sections will appear as you tab to each link. Press return to move the focus to the selected section so that you can tab to any links in the text.

Your browser is using JavaScript, but you've either decided to turn the interactive feature off, or you don't have cookies enabled. Our system uses a local cookie to store your choice of interactive or all-text mode so you don't have to choose each time you visit a new page. The cookie is only read by the browser and nothing is sent back to the server. Even if you have cookies disabled, you can still turn interactive mode on manually on each page - use the "explore this page interactively" link in the "On this page" column, or press access key 9 (see below for more on access keys).

Pressing Alt-9 (Windows) or Ctrl-9 (Macintosh) in most browsers will switch between all-text and interactive-text modes. In all-text mode, the links in the contents area jump to the relevant part of the page.

We believe that our technique adds addtional interactivity and interest to web pages, without impairing access. We've been able to link the show/hide mechanism to multimedia features such as QuickTime panoramas and Flash movies, creating dynamic sites which still allow every visitor full access to all the text content.

If you have problems with the interactive text feature, try switching to all-text mode. If you use a screen reader and experience problems, please let us know.

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Additional navigation and information

For keyboard users, there are hidden links on each page that jump to the site navigation (which is at the end of the document flow), and from the top of that section there's a link back to the page content.

The underlying code for the pages includes information about how the pages relate to one another. For example, they all include a link to the home page, and to this page, defined as 'Help' in the link code. These links show up in some text-only browsers such as Lynx. They can also be seen in some visual browsers such as Mozilla 1.2 or later - from the View menu choose Show/Hide, then Site Navigation Bar and select Show Only as Needed.

Many links throughout the site have a title which describes the content of the destination in more detail. These titles appear as 'tool tips' in many browsers.

Abbreviations and acronyms have their full meanings attached using the relevant HTML tags. Some browsers, such as Firefox, show the full version as a 'tool tip'.

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Standards compliance

All the pages on this site are written as far as possible to comply with World Wide Web Consortium standards. This makes sure that the pages are written in a way that should work in all browsers. In practice, unfortunately, some widely-used browsers have severe bugs that mean they don't work with some parts of standard HTML. For that reason, the pages with interactive panoramas use non-standard tags that which allow the pages to appear correctly in almost all browsers.

Creating pages to W3C standards takes care of the some accessibility needs, for example making sure that all images have text equivalents. Going further, all pages on this site meet the Priority 1 standards of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, with many also complying with Priority 2 and Priority 3.

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References

I am grateful to many of the invaluable online resources about web accessibility, both current and now deceased. Information on web accessibility can be found at the Web Accessibility Initiative and WebAIM amongst others.

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Access keys

In most browsers you can use keyboard shortcuts to link to the main sections of the site. On a Mac, hold down the Control key and press the relevant number - in Windows, use Alt and the number.
0) Home
1) About Corvidae
2) Why Accessibility Matters
3) Virtual Tours
4) Exhibitions & Interpretation
5) Voice-over
6) Accessibility statement (this page)
7) Contact Us
8) News
9) Switch between interactive and all text modes

 

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Site navigation

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