Accessibility information

Deakin University is committed to continuous quality improvement; one important facet of this is web accessibility. Through the provision of a standard web template, the University attempts to ensure that its web sites are as accessible as possible to the largest number of adaptive technology users. By developing and deploying a standard web template across the domain we aim to:

ensure validation to HTML standards, making it easier for screen readers to understand the page,
following the Web Accessibility Initiative guidelines particularly by including suitable descriptive texts for images, illustrative hyperlinks and informative titles on every page, and
adherence to best practice in web standards, structuring code for maximum accessibility.

The standard navigation structures of Deakin's web sites are designed so that they are WCAG AA and HTML 4.01 (transitional) compliant and we are working towards CSS compliance. We continue to strive towards achieving WCAG AA compliance on all Deakin web sites.

Deakin University's web site includes a number of accessible design features including:

A floating "tool bar" to control on-screen text size, print-friendly views and the ability to mail a page URL to a friend
A link at the top of each page to allow users who utilise screen reading software to easily skip to content
The use of "access keys" to provide keyboard shortcuts for important navigation options. The use of access keys differs according to browsers:

Mozilla Firefox	Mozilla	Internet Explorer	Takes you to
Shift + Alt + 1	Alt + 1	Alt + 1 + Enter	Deakin home page
Shift + Alt + 2	Alt + 2	Alt + 2 + Enter	Contact us and feedback page
Shift + Alt + 3	Alt + 3	Alt + 3 + Enter	Staff directory
Shift + Alt + 4	Alt + 4	Alt + 4 + Enter	Site map
Shift + Alt + 5	Alt + 5	Alt + 5 + Enter	A-Z index page
Shift + Alt + 6	Alt + 6	Alt + 6 + Enter	Help page
Shift + Alt + 7	Alt + 7	Alt + 7 + Enter	Deakin portal
Shift + Alt + 8	Alt + 8	Alt + 8 + Enter	Search page
Shift + Alt + 9	Alt + 9	Alt + 9 + Enter	Printer friendly view of the current page
Shift + Alt + 0	Alt + 0	Alt + 0 + Enter	Copyright information page

Mac users: control key and press the relevant number key.

Divs and tables

Where possible Deakin uses "div" tags (the tag defines a division/section in a document) for sectioning and managing the page content. In some instances, tables are used to control for page layout, however, where these occur, they should render gracefully.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

CSS can be switched on or off and pages will still render information accurately. The standard Deakin Web template conforms to the W3C CSS1 standard. Relative sizes have been used for fonts and most other attributes (table widths, etc.). Padding and margins around some elements are given absolute values.

Structural markup

The standard Deakin Web template uses the header elements h1, h2, h3 etc. Important items have been highlighted with the use of strong or em, and lists have been marked up using ul and li tags. Classes are used for display of standard icons eg. open in new window, Ms Office documents, as well as for the reuse of colour schemes on pages.

Scripting

All use of scripting is on the server side, so users can turn off JavaScript or other client side technologies and still gain full access to the content on the site.

Form labels

Where forms have been used, labels have been explicitly associated with input elements. For instance, the label "Enter search terms" has been created and associated with the search input box, it is anticipated that this may assist with motor ability.