Oriana Singers website accessibility

Accessibility

This page offers help with using the Oriana Singers site.

Access Keys

We have defined access keys on each page as follows:

Access Key 1 Home
Access Key 2 Skip to Navigation
Access Key 3 Sitemap
Access Key 4 About us
Access Key 5 Events
Access Key 6 Weddings
Access Key 7 Links
Access Key 9 Feedback/Contact: the key opens a mailto: link
Access Key 0 - this Accessibility Statement

You can use Access Keys to jump to specific links. On Windows machines, you can press Alt + an access (number) key; on Macintosh machines, you can press Ctrl + an access (number) key. In some browsers (eg Mozilla) this will take you straight to the page. In others (eg Internet Explorer) you will need to press Enter. In Opera, you need to press Shift+Esc, and then the number of the key.

Help with Navigation

For text-only and aural browsers, the site is written so that the main content comes first. For these browsers, the first link on each page skips the main text and takes you to the main navigation bar.

There are rel=start, help and contents links in the header section of the code for each page to aid navigation in text-only browsers. You can also use these links in Netscape 6 and Mozilla by selecting the View menu, Show/Hide, Site Navigation Bar, Show Only As Needed (or Show Always). In Opera, go to View, Toolbars, Navigation Bar.

The start link takes you to the Home page, the help link to this accessibility page, and the contents link takes you to the Contents page. The pages in the Archive are linked by next and previous links to take you step by step through the archive. On each Archive page there is also an up link to take you back to the Archive Contents page.

Standards

We have written our website in valid XHTML 1.0. You can use the first button below to confirm this. We have used valid CSS to format and present the pages (so no tables, except to tabulate our membership lists). The second link below takes you to a site where you can confirm this for our stylesheet (www.orianasingers.btinternet.co.uk/detail/abstyle.css).

This site uses and

We have used WebXact to check each page against the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines . Each page meets all the automatic checkpoints . We have considered the manual checkpoints, and believe that we`meet them. We may have missed the point, or you may disagree. Please let us know if there is something on this site that makes it difficult for you to use.

Images

We have used images sparingly. Every image has a short description given by both alt and title tags. The logo image of Fair Oriana has longdesc and D links to the description below. Other buttons are self-explanatory. You will also find some links to photographs from the History page (www.pyefleet.com/oriana/history.html).

Oriana

Picture of Queen Elizabeth I as Oriana from the frontispiece of Thomas Morley's 1601 collection of Madrigals "The Triumphs of Oriana". We use this image as the website logo.

Website

We started the website in February 2004 as a resource for people who come to hear us sing, choir members and anyone who is interested in English Church Music. Our aim is to be clear, informative and accessible. We wrote the first version using Notepad and simple (not always valid) HTML, learning as we went along. As beginners, we found Weballey a particularly helpful guide. In spring 2005 we upgraded the whole site to HTML 4.01, using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), though with Tables for layout. In Summer 2005 we upgraded to XHTML 1.0 Strict, using CSS for layout. We used Coffee Cup software for this. We have found Mark Pilgrim's Dive Into Accessibility very helpful in designing our site.

Printing

Most printers will print a simpler, black and white version of our pages that we hope you will find more convenient. You can see the stylesheet for this at www.pyefleet.com/oriana/detail/printstyle.css.

Mobile Website

You can find out about forthcoming events on our mobile website: www.pyefleet.com/oriana/mobile/index.xhtml. These pages are written using XHTML-MP and CSS and each is less than 1Kb in size. They should load without problems on recent (WAP 2.0) handheld devices, and on PCs with Mozilla, Firefox and Opera (but not Internet Explorer). You can also access our main website from many handheld devices, but these pages are bigger (up to 20Kb) and more complex. We cannot be sure how they will display. If your device implements CSS properly and recognises the "handheld" media label (many mobiles don't), it will display a simpler version of the page that is easier to navigate. You can find the stylesheet for this at www.pyefleet.com/oriana/detail/handstyle.css.