FFN Accessibility Statement
Introduction
Many websites are built in a record breaking time and it shows. I can say that Forever For Now is different in many ways, instead of being a kludged together piece of HTML code it's a refined website that has evolved over the years to provide an optimal user experience, even for visually impaired people.
The trick behing creating a usable and more importantly accessible website is combining a lot of knowledge into an easy to navigate page structure and using the right tools to offer graceful fallback in page rendering so you can always read the content, no matter what browser or connection you have.
Everyone's invited and welcome here.
Browser Compatibility
Using a highly optimized combination of HTML code for markup and CSS for the graphical layout of the site I can offer you a fully browser independent website. You don't need a certain operating system with proprietary software to enjoy the articles I wrote. You can be yourself at any time.
Where others stop at testing their design in Internet Explorer, I start the other way around: write validating and compatible webpages and then work around all the bugs present in Internet Explorer. The advantage is that Forever For Now renders correctly in anything ranging from Mozilla Firefox, via KDE's Konqueror, via Opera to text-mode browsers like Lynx.
Not only does this help you as a visitor of the site, it also positively affects the ranking in search engine indices so you'll find my content first when searching for something.
Accessibility
Access Keys
On most browsers you can use a key combination to quickly access sections of a website. For instance, Mozilla's Firefox defines an access key using the Alt key combined with a keystroke. KDE's Konqueror offers this functionality by pressing Ctrl first and then entering another key.
I've added the following access keys to the basic page template of Forever For Now:
- Access key 1 - Home page
- Access key 2 - Skip to the page content
- Access key 3 - Top of the page
- Access key 4 - Search field
- Access key 5 - Contact me via e-mail
- Access key 6 - Search page
- Access key 0 - Accessibility statement, the page you're reading now
All top-level menu items are accessible using alphabetic access keys starting with the letter A. Use these access keys to quickly switch between the sections of this site.
Try out some access keys, I'm sure you'll like them.
Navigation aids
For text-mode browsers, I added a skip navigation link so you don't have to scroll through pages of menu links. Besides that, there's links to the top of the page, the start of the main content and a full fledged sitemap displaying the full site structure.
You can also use the integrated search box or search engine to find pages matching given keywords or phrases.
Links
Many links on this site use the title attribute to provide more information than defined in the anchor text. The text is worded to give contextual information about where the link will go. Most external links are marked as such. Opening links in new browser windows is kept to a bare minimum.
Visual design
- This site uses cascading style sheets (CSS) for visual layout.
- This site uses only relative font sizes, compatible with the user-specified text-size option in visual browsers.
- If your browser or browsing device does not support stylesheets at all, the content of each page is still readable.
- This site has been created with a multitude of font sets in mind, ranging from the Microsoft core web fonts via standard Mac fonts to the free Bitstream Vera and URW families.
Summarized
Forever For Now is here for everyone. Enjoy the site, I hope you'll discover a lot of useful information during your stay.
The accessibility statement was added to the site on the 13th of February 2006 and updated to reflect further changes on the 14th of February 2006. On the 1st of February 2007 I updated this page again because of a new website design.