Website Accessibility
Welcome to the accessibility statement for Gladstone's Library. This page covers the accessibility and standards compliance measures taken by Gladstone's Library, as well as guidelines on how to take advantage of those features. We have made every reasonable attempt to make the content on this website as accessible as possible to all disabled persons.
Why does our site need to be accessible?
An accessible website has a huge number of advantages - Blind users may utilise a screen reader which uses speech synthesis to read out a web site's content, valid and semantic XHTML design means that this will work the way that the software intends. Partially sighted visitors will need to increase the size of the text on your website and valid CSS design will be needed to allow this to happen. Deaf visitors and those with no mouse access along with web users with Colour Blindness and even Epilepsy are also considered.
Web Standards & Guidlines
This site has been built using code compliant with W3C standards for XHTML and CSS. The site displays correctly in current browsers and using standards compliant XHTML/CSS code means any future browsers will also display it correctly.
The site uses semantically correct mark-up (the correct tag for the correct purpose), text size can be increased via your browser and wherever Flash and Javascript are used, measures have been put in place to ensure that viewers without Flash 7 or with Javascript disabled will still be able to use the site to it's full potential.
Links within this website use descriptive title attributes. These supply additional information about the nature of the link. Links are also provided in such a way that they make sense out of context. All content images used in this site include descriptive 'ALT' attributes.
Finally, this website uses relative font sizes, which means they can be easily resized by browsers if you find the type difficult to read. The font size can be amended by using the appropiate menu options as follows:
- Firefox: View > Text size
- Internet Explorer: View > Text size
- Opera: File > Preferences > Fonts > Minimum font size (pixels)
- Safari: View > Make Text Bigger (or Make Text Smaller)
Alternatively, scroll with the wheel of your mouse whilst holding down the control key.
Exceptions
Whilst Gladstone's Library strive to adhere to the accepted guidelines and standards for accessibility and usability, it is not always possible to do so in all areas of the website. If you find a specific problem, please contact us.