About this site
Standards compliance
The site is developed to comply with the W3C's XHTML 1.0 Strict DTD, using structural markup and stylesheets for presentation.
It will display best in standards-compliant graphical browsers, and is designed to be functional (but not pretty) in older browsers.
Style sheet options
Several stylesheet options are provided for enhanced accessibility, including a high contrast option with large fonts. We are using a style switcher developed by Andrew Norman from Monash University. It uses servide-side processing (PHP), and works in any browser as long as you allow cookies to be set. Once the script has been documented, we will provide a link to enable you to download and use this on your own websites.
Page design
The navigation menu is displayed on the right of screen and appears last in the logical order of the page so that screen reader users don't have to hear the menu read out at the start of every page. It also benefits those who use the keyboard for navigation, because they don't have to tab past the menu to access links within the page content.
Testing and bugs
Markup and stylesheets used on this site have been validated. Accessibility has been evaluated using The WAVE and Cynthia Says. Browser testing on a range of browsers is in progress. Results are shown below.
Browser testing
- Windows XP
- Internet Explorer versions 6, 5.5, 5, 4, 3.02
- Mozilla versions 1.5, 1.6
- Firefox version 0.8
- Opera versions 7.5, 7.23, 6.06, 5.02
- Netscape versions 7.1, 6.23, 4.79, 3.04
- Lynx version 2.8.4
- IBM Home Page Reader version 3.02
- Windows 2000
- Internet Explorer version 6
- Mozilla version 1.5
- Netscape 4.79
- Mac OSX 10.3.4
- Internet Explorer version 5.2
- Safari version 1.2.2
- Camino version 0.8b
- Omniweb version 5.0b
- Firefox version 0.8
- Opera version 7.5
- Mac OSX 10.3.3
- Safari version 1.2.1
- Camino version 0.7
- Mozilla version 1.5
- Fedora core 1
- Firefox 0.8
Known problems
- Internet Explorer version 4: the navigation menu displays on the left side of the screen and overlaps the content.
- All recent browsers apart from Internet Explorer 6 (for which the design is optimised as it represents the largest user group) drop the navigation menu down between 0.5 and 3 ems from the top of the content box. This is only a minor cosmetic issue.
Feedback and suggestions
Feedback or suggestions about this site should be sent to iza.bartosiewicz@rmit.edu.au