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About Accessibility on the CABS Webpage

This webpage has been designed with hopes of making it pleasant to use in both a visual and a non-visual fashion.

For access by screen readers and search engines:

  • It makes use of the header mark-up syntax of HTML, which makes it possible for screen readers to jump to important sections of information, along with CSS styling to give this syntax some character.
  • It makes use of tags on all the images that appear.
  • In many other webpages, a menu on the left tends to naturally show up before the contents of the page for those using screen readers, causing them to have to go through the links before getting to the content. We have tried a design in which the screen reader or search engine will find the contents of the page before the menu, even though the menu is still located on the left.
  • It contains same-page links to get to relevant areas such as the side menu. Some of these links are invisible so that they don't interfere with the esthetics of the page.
For visual users:
  • It contains fonts that should appear most readable on a variety of computer screens.
  • The font sizes are specified with units of measure which are relative rather than fixed, hopefully making it so that they can be enlarged using a web browser.
  • The accessibility section offers a choice between the default style sheet, or a low vision style sheet, which uses larger fonts and a color scheme, that should work better with zoom applications.

Accessible does not necessarily have to be ugly. Accessibility is very important to us, but the way we present ourselves visually also matters, and we hope that this message comes through in our website.

Nevertheless, We admit that this is sort of an effort of amateurs. The site designer is a screen reader user by trade, possessing little experience in visual access, or any of the other challenges that people confront on the internet. As a result, suggestions are always welcome.