About this site

Thank you for visiting our site. This page contains a general description of our site, and several comments about its accessibility.

Accessibility | Navigation advices | Downloading docs

Accessibility

The accessibility of our site is very important because we want to reach our constituency mainly through the net, although it is obvious that traditional methods must be used as well. Therefore, we cannot afford to ignore the characteristics of our audience.

When designing this site, we have followed the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0, from the Web Accessibility Initiative of the World Wide Web Consortium. These guidelines have the category of recommendation, and we fully support their implementation all over the net.

In regard to the level of compliance, we had to balance the application of all of the accessibility guidelines, with the compatibility with older browsers (for example, we use tables for the navigation bar, that will allow a graceful transformation of the site whenever no style-sheets are not supported). That did not allow us to get a triple-A compliance, but a double-AA.

We can claim that these pages conform to W3C's "Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0", available at http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WAI-WEBCONTENT-19990505,level Double-A. We have decided not to display this symbol in every page but on those which we believe is meaningful.

We could show as well the Web Access symbol in every page, as developed by the CPB/WGBH National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM), shown to the left of this paragraph. NCAM made this image (a globe, marked with a grid, tilts at an angle; a keyhole is cut into its surface) available to webmasters to denote that their site contains accessibility features to accommodate the needs of disabled users. (This image was created by Stormship Studios of Boston, Massachusetts.) In this token we followed the same approach: the symbol will be displayed whenever appropriate.

Last, but not least, we checked our site against the latest version of Bobby (v.3.1.1), a software developed by the Center of Applied Special Technology (CAST) to test accessibility of web pages. Our site passes the test, thus we were entitled to use the Bobby approved icon in our pages

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Navigation advices

We have tried to make the navigation through our site as simple as possible. Each page is divided in two parts. The top bar contains the navigation bar, and below is the contents of the page. To simplify the navigation, there are two features incorporated in each page:

1. The navigation bar will be on the top of the page, whereas the actual contents of the pages are on the right column.
2. AccessKeys (Shorthand access through the keyboard to the links) are implemented consistently. Not all the browsers support AccessKeys (to our knowledge, only Internet Explorer does at the moment), but we hope that the newest versions will do so. These keys can be accessed through the combination: [Alt]+number, and then [Enter]. The defined keys are:
   

   Key	Links to
   1	Home Page
   2	Projects
   3	Documents
   4	Our Links
   5	Forum
   6	FAQs
   7	Sponsors
   8	Contact
   9	This Page

A navigation map will be provided soon. If you have suggestions about the site, its design, errors, broken links, etc., please, send an email to: webmaster@isdac.org

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Downloading Documents

From this site there are some documents available for download. We decided to use the Portable Document Format (PDF) from Adobe. The reason is twofold:

1. There is a free viewer software (Adobe Acrobat) in their website, available for almost any platform and operative system, so we don't tie our visitors to a propietary system.
2. We can make available quality-print documents to our visitors. Text-only versions can be obtained from the Accessibility Site of Adobe.

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What has been said about us

"We are very impressed with the ISdAC Web site. As ISdAC clearly demonstrate, attractive, functional Web sites, which are accessible to everyone, can be achieved."
Julie Howell, Campaigns Officer (Digital), RNIB, UK

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