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Suit yourself

Here's how you can change the way our website looks, to suit your own needs:

• To make the text larger (or smaller):
  • If you have a wheel mouse: hold down the Control key and spin the wheel to make the fonts smaller or larger (this should work on most web sites)(Internet Explorer 7 has changed the way that this works so it expands and contracts the whole page, very inconveiently so you have to keep scrolling sideways);
    • Or you can use Control + and Control -;
    • Or use the zoom in the bottom right hand corner of IE7;
  • Or use the View Menu/Text Size to change the size (this works for Internet Explorer and Firefox - other browsers will vary).
• To change colours and other appearance:
  1. Click on Change Site Appearance in the top left and choose your preferred style. The third style is completely linear and may be easiest for blind people.
  2. The third style meets Colour Contrast Guidelines - the others have less contrast in some areas designed to meet the needs of those with Visual Stress or Meares/Irlen syndrome, for which there are no formal standards that we are aware of. However, the colours still generally meet the important readability tests for contrast and colour difference. Do you like the strong colours that we use? Please let us know how readable you find our standard colour scheme.
  3. You can also use our Readable program to change the colour, font and spacing in practically all Windows programs and websites.
  4. Or you can download the free Techdis toolbar (for Internet Explorer) to configure most websites to your taste.
  5. Or you could use your own style sheet if you have one. (If you don't know what this means, you probably haven't!).

Please take the trouble to feed back to us comments about the site, particularly any difficulties that you have. It is impossible to test with all the different combinations of people, computers and browsers that exist. So we need your feedback. Many Thanks In Anticipation (TIA)! Here's how to get to our full contact details and phone numbers.

Accessibility Policy Summary

At iansyst Ltd we take accessibility seriously and have gone to a lot of trouble to make our site as accessible as possible to as many people as possible, (see below for a list of resources). Over 50% of the adult (18-64) population have problems with vision, dexterity, hearing or cognition that make them likely to benefit from accessible technology, according to the Microsoft/Forrester report of 2003 The Wide Range of Abilities and Its Impact on Computer Technology. Not to mention younger and older people. So we regard accessibility as essential and ever more so as the average computer user gets older.

We have followed the Guidelines in PAS 78 Guide to Good Practice in Commissioning Accessible Websites. The Publicly Available Specification (PAS) 78 has been developed by the Disability Rights Commission (DRC) in collaboration with BSI (The British Standards Institute) and we recommend it.

Our pages are validated to the current HTML and CSS standards and should conform to either Level A or Level Double-A of the current W3C (Worldwide Web Consortium) accessibility guidelines WCAG Version 1, except that we have so far been unable to get our shopping cart and a couple of other features to work without JavaScript. We also satisfy many of the Triple-A guidelines, but achieving full compliance is almost impossible until browsers support all the listed measures.

We are also trying to meet the requirements of the new WCAG2 standard, which is only in draft at present (and not yet referred to by PAS 78). See below.

Exceptions to this policy are a few pages hosted by us but created by outside writers, where we would have to change the original document's character in order to meet the guidelines.

Our pages are designed to work with a wide range of web browsers on Windows, Mac and Linux computers. Our graphics are optimised for fast downloading.

We have decided not to implement Access Keys: see Access keys, of Limited Practical Value.

WCAG2 Conformance claim

The following is the conformance claim that we intend to make for WCAG2 for this and other iansyst web sites. Testing and development are ongoing. Please let us know if you find any areas of non-conformance.

On [1 July 2006], http://www.dyslexic.com conforms to W3C's WCAG 2.0, Conformance Level Double-A. The baseline for this claim is XHTML Transitional (moving to strict 1.1). The specification that this content "relies upon" is: XHTML Transitional. Some parts, including the shopping cart and registration, "rely upon" JavaScript 1.2. The specifications that this content "uses but does not rely on" are: CSS2, jpeg, png and gif. This content was tested using the following user agents and assistive technologies: Firefox 1.5 on Windows 2000 SP4 with Jaws 7.0, Firefox 1.5 on Windows XP SP 2 with Jaws 7.0, IE 6.0 on Windows 2000 SP4 with Jaws 7.0, and IE 6.0 on Windows XP SP2 with Jaws 7.0, Safari 2.0 with OS X 10.4.

Web design for dyslexia

At dyslexic.com we try to keep the needs of our visitors in mind at all times. Reading from a computer screen is less comfortable than reading from paper, even if you are a fluent reader; it is harder still if you find reading difficult! Whilst accessible web pages benefit everyone by being simple and easy to use, dyslexic readers find some styles of layout and punctuation better than others. We have therefore used the following principles when putting pages together:

1. We prefer numbered lists to bulleted ones, especially if there are more then three or four items – dyslexic and other print impaired people often find that the numbers give them a frame of reference, so they can move around the list more easily;
2. We no longer add punctuation marks to the end of headings, list items, etc., to stop screen-reading software from running the line into the following text: the better screen readers now pause correctly at the end of lines and all screen readers should do so;
3. Text is kept short and simple where possible;
4. Longer discussion articles are presented as a single web page for easier printing or reading off-line;
5. For our standard font we have chosen Verdana MS, which comes as standard with many Windows computers and is well spaced and clearer than most commonly-available fonts. For heading we us Trebuchet MS, another clean, legible, well implemented font.
6. We like to use colour as a dyslexia-friendly means to flag different functional areas of the screen. This means that we don't use a toolbar to change screen colours as these can currently only deal with a single uniform colour. We allow you to change style sheets instead – (Change Site Appearance in the top left hand corner).

Accessibility resources

1. The Plain English Campaign is our style model. It is not always easy to write clear, concise, dyslexia friendly text and to avoid the over-formal style that we are tempted to use in commerce. PEC's free guides are excellent, particularly the first one on How to write in plain English
2. We have helped the British Dyslexia Association do a very helpful Style Guide to writing in a dyslexia friendly way.
3. PAS 78 Guide to Good Practice in Commissioning Accessible Websites. One copy available free from the DRC.
4. The World Wide Web Consortium's Web Accessibility Initiative issues the official guidelines for accessible web documents in the form of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). You can research both WCAG1 and WCAG2 there.
5. TechDis is an online resource centre for disability information, mainly aimed at Higher Education but of universal interest.
6. Accessibility is not just a matter of satisfying one particular type of need. The RNIB has good resources from the VI point of view.
7. There are various toolbars for Internet Explorer and Firefox which let you manipulate various features relevant to accessibility, let you test your site for syntactical correctness and (up to a point) for accessibility. Our favourite at the moment is the AIS Web Accessibility Toolbar.
8. The UK government's guidelines for producing their own accessible websites are very good and very comprehensive, but don't particularly talk about dyslexia, and aren't being updated.
9. You can download Ian Litterick's PowerPoint presentation on Dyslexia and Disability Friendly Web Sites, which is a bit cryptic without the voice, but expands on some of the resources above and links to them.
   • Dyslexia and Disability Friendly Web Sites: Powerpoint 400k;
   • Dyslexia and Disability Friendly Web Sites: PDF 80k;
   • Dyslexia and Disability Friendly Web Sites: RTF 70k.

Fully rewritten 2006 Ian Litterick.
Long term persistent url (PURL) http://www.dyslexic.com/accessibility. Article last updated: 20 April 2007