Accessibility statement

The Library Service is committed to ensuring that this website is accessible to as many people and devices as possible. Accessibility is not just about making it better for people with disabilities, it's about making it better for everyone.

If you experience any accessibility issues, please let us know.

Features

Font sizes

These are specified in a way that allows resizing in all browsers. Change the font size in your browser by going to View/Text Size or View/Text Zoom and select a size. In Mozilla and Firefox you can also use the Ctrl plus + or - keys to change the font size.

Navigation

  • All pages include "skip" links for users who use speech browsers or keyboard navigation and wish to avoid repeated groupings of links.
  • You can access the Home page by selecting the "Home" tab or the "Library Service" image at the top of each page.
  • "Top" links (to move to the top of the current page) have been used sparingly so as not to distract from the content, or interfere with browser functionality. If no "Top" link exists, use your keyboard Home or Page Up keys, or use the scroll bar.

Printing

Printed pages from this site will automatically provide a plain text "print version". The result will be very different from the screen version. This is intentional, to make printing faster, and to save ink and paper by removing unnecessary elements (including navigation and images) from the page. By design, this will also provide legible display on handheld devices. Alternate versions of pages which originate from actual documents (such as the Library Update and Fact Sheets) are provided as PDF downloads.

Standards

Albert Einstein supporting web standards

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), along with other groups and standards bodies, has established technologies for creating and interpreting web-based content. These technologies, known as "web standards", are carefully designed to deliver the greatest benefits to the greatest number of web users while ensuring the long-term viability of any document published on the Web.

By designing and developing this website with these standards, we simplify and lower the cost of production and maintenance and are able to deliver content that is accessible to more people and more types of Internet devices. Websites developed along these lines will continue to function correctly as traditional desktop browsers evolve, and as new Internet devices come to market.

Compliance

  • Pages on this site comply with all of the Australian Government Information Management Office Guide to Minimum Website Standards. All the guidelines have been reviewed and we believe that these pages are in compliance.
  • Pages on this site are WCAG AA approved, complying with all Priority 1,2 and most Priority 3 guidelines of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. This is a subjective judgement; many guidelines are intentionally vague and can not be tested automatically. All the guidelines have been reviewed and we believe that these pages are mostly in compliance.
  • Pages on this site are mostly Watchfire WebXACT AA approved, complying with most Watchfire WebXACT guidelines. This is always a subjective judgement; many accessibility features can be measured, but many can not. All the guidelines have been reviewed and we believe that these pages are mostly in compliance.
  • All pages on this site validate as HTML 4.01 Strict. This is not a subjective judgement; a program can determine with 100% accuracy whether a page is valid HTML.
  • All pages on this site use structured, semantic markup.
  • A colour contrast analyser has determined that this site passes all tests for luminosity contrast ratio, colour difference and brightness difference. This is in accordance with the WCAG 1.0 recommendation to "ensure that foreground and background color combinations provide sufficient contrast when viewed by someone having color deficits or when viewed on a black and white screen".

Technical information

Access keys

Many browsers support jumping to specific links by typing keys defined on the web site. However, using these keys is a contentious issue amongst developers, and there are plenty of good reasons not to use access keys. We have chosen not to use access keys. Not all browsers support them, and research shows that they can conflict with shortcut keys used by assistive technologies.

Links

  • Many links have title attributes which describe the link in greater detail, unless the text of the link already fully describes the target. This is typically displayed as a "tool tip" in graphical browsers.
  • Links are written to make sense out of context.

Images

All content images used in this site include descriptive alt attributes. Purely decorative graphics include null alt attributes.

Visual design

  • The visual layout for this site is "powered" by CSS, in accordance with recommended current best practice and web standards.
  • If your browser or browsing device does not support style sheets, everything here is still usable and readable, it's just not so pretty.

Javascript

A minimal amount of Javascript is used on this site to aid visual design and user interaction. The site is still fully functional if Javascript is turned off or not available.

Browsers

You will benefit most from this site by using a standards-compliant browser, but it should work in most modern browsers. These browsers best support web standards:

Time and equipment restraints prevent us from supporting the following browsers:

  • Netscape Navigator 4
  • IE 5 or lower (Mac)
  • IE 4 or lower (PC)

Why so plain?

This site is styled using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). If you can read this message, either you have disabled styles yourself, your browser does not support CSS sufficiently well to be served up the styles, or you are viewing this on a mobile device. Everything here is still readable and usable, it's just not so pretty :)

These pages have been crafted for printing, so appear different from what you see on screen.
See http://www.rch.org.au/library/accessibility.htm