Accessibility Statement
Accessibility: to avoid creating unnecessary impediments, for people and devices, to accessing the content of a web site.
— Tommy Olsson
If you have something to say about the accessibility of The Autistic Cuckoo, please contact us and let us know.
Access Keys
The use of access keys on web sites is somewhat controversial, but we have chosen to use a few:
- 0
- Information about access keys and accessibility (this page).
- 1
- The home page (start page).
- 2
- Jump past the content and go directly to the navigation menu.
- 3
- Site map.
- 4
- Search form.
- 8
- Terms of use.
- 9
- Contact us – a form where you can send an email to the authors.
How you activate an access key depends on which browser and which operating system you're using. We presume that you, if you need access keys, already know how to activate them.
Images
All images that convey information have a text equivalent and, if needed, also a separate description. The exceptions are images that we use for purely decorative purposes.
Colours
We don't convey any information through colour alone. However, we are aware that the contrast may be insufficient in some cases, but we hope it's not so bad that the text is completely illegible.
Tables
There aren't that many tables on The Autistic Cuckoo, and those we have are used for tabular data, not for layout. We have marked up header cells and provided a summary for each table.
Design and Layout
All design and layout is handled through style sheets, not tables. Browsers which don't support style sheets receive the same content, but without the design. In modern browsers, the content adapts to the size of the window.
Scripts
All pages work even with browsers which don't support client-side scripting, or where this has been disabled. The existing scripts provide some kind of added value, but they are in no way critical.
Miscellaneous
- The markup code marks up the different semantic components of a page. All pages validate in the W3C validator.
- The natural language is specified as either English or Swedish on each page. We have marked up any words or phrases in foreign languages.
- We serve pages in the language (English or Swedish) and with the content type (XHTML or HTML) that the browser says that it prefers.
Checkpoints in WCAG 1.0
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) publishes a checklist with checkpoints for accessibility. This checklist is the basis of most national and international legislation and recommendations on accessibility, and we have tried to satisfy as many checkpoints as possible.
Some checkpoints are purely judgment calls, and we have attempted to be as objective as we can.
| Checkpoints | Priority | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | |
| Total | 16 | 30 | 20 |
| Satisfied | 9 | 26 | 12 |
| Not satisfied | 0 | 0 | 5 |
| Not applicable | 7 | 4 | 3 |
Checkpoints That Are Not Satisfied
- The contrast between the text and background colours is too low in some places, where aesthetic considerations have prevailed over maximum legibility (checkpoint 2.2, priority 3 for text).
- We don't use access keys to the extent recommended by the guidelines, since they cause conflicts with functions in browsers and assistive technologies (checkpoint 9.5, priority 3).
- In the few cases where we have tables that don't linearise well, we haven't created an alternate, more accessible page (checkpoint 10.3, priority 3).
- We don't have any placeholders in form controls, since we think that the downsides more than outweigh the advantages (checkpoint 10.4, priority 3).
- We haven't supplemented the text content with graphic or auditory presentations, mostly because we lack the necessary competence (checkpoint 14.2, priority 3).
Summary
Since we don't satisfy all priority-3 checkpoints, we comply with level
AA
of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
(WCAG) 1.0.