Accessibility
Location – Home – Legal – AccessibilityCalifornia is a pioneer in the history of universal access. As home to the Independent Living Movement in the 1960s, the state has set an example in guaranteeing the civil rights of people with disabilities.
It is in this great tradition that I have rebuilt my website from the ground up. All of the content is as accessible as possible, and complies with the emerging W3C Web Accessibility Initiative Aria standards.
This website’s design is predicated on the principle that content should be first and foremost. Consequently, the site’s form is built to fit its function. Below are listed some of the features integral to its structure.
HTML5+CSS3
The HTML5 standards were officially deemed ‘functionally complete’ by the World Wide Web Consortium on Monday 17 December 2012. The new standards add many features that significantly enhance the accessibility of content.
This website is coded entirely using HTML5+CSS3. It currently avoids the use of new features that are potentially problematic for accessibility, such as the new Canvas element. All text is encoded using the international Unicode UTF-8 standard.
WAI Aria Rôles
The W3C’s universal access project is the Web Accessibility Initiative. Founded in 1997, the group has worked on a myriad of standards. Amongst them is the WAI Aria specification, which is still in draft stage.
This website makes use of WAI Aria’s Document Landmark Rôle function, which allows the functional structure of a document to be described in detail. Every page in this site uses Aria Rôles, so that disabled readers can navigate through content quickly and easily.
Semantic HTML
This website is written in Semantic HTML. It is also built using a form of progressive design – that is, a design that is applied on top of content, rather than the other way around.
The purpose of Semantic HTML is to completely separate content from its presentation. In addition, content is given structure and tagged with contextual metadata. The result is a website that is more accessible to all.
If for some reason your web browser is unable to render any page in this site correctly, the page’s content will still be perfectly readable.
Responsive Design
As more people access the web using a variety of different devices, it has become increasingly difficult to design websites. One solution has been to build separate versions for select devices. This website instead uses a single responsive design for all devices.
The design of this website automatically adapts itself to fit your screen. Content will reformat accordingly, but the size of text will remain consistent.
The site is also resolution independent: pages will scale uniformly if you need to increase text size for the purpose of readability.
Image Captions
All images on this website are tagged with descriptive captions for visually-impaired readers.
Video Captions
Every video on this website is close-captioned, and has a text transcript attached.