Accessibility Statement

• Introduction
• Technical specification
• Compliance
• Access Keys or Keyboard Shortcuts
• Navigation Aids
• PDF Documents

 

This website aims to be as accessible as possible. By accessibility, we mean that people, including those with disabilities such as vision impairment, can access our website.

We are interested in accessibility for various reasons: we fundamentally believe that people with disabilities should be given equal opportunity to participate in and contribute to the full range of economic, social, cultural and political activities. Our responsibility is also legal. In Australia the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (http://www.hreoc.gov.au/disability_rights/standards/www_3/www_3.html) is federal legislation that creates new rules for web access. The Act deems websites to be 'goods and services' (see section 24) and should, therefore, be accessible to people with disabilities. Developing an accessible website promotes other aspects that are not always necessarily apparent, e.g. highly accessible documents generally display and download faster, are easier to navigate and are more user friendly to the broadest range of users and devices as possible. More information and news relating to accessibility and the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 can be found at http://www.hreoc.gov.au/disability_rights/index.html.

This website has been developed to display adequately on all commonly used modern web browsers. An absolute minimum screen resolution of 800 pixels by 600 pixels is required, but we recommend 1024 pixels by 768 pixels to optimally view material on this site. It has been designed to be as accessible and usable as possible by:

Using cascading style sheets for site structure and layout.

Using only relative font sizes, compatible with the user-specified 'text size' option in visual browsers. This means that text within the site can be resized to suit a viewers needs.

Ensuring that if your browser or browsing device does not support stylesheets at all, the content of each page is still readable.

All content images used in this site include descriptive ALT attributes. Purely decorative graphics include empty ALT attributes.

Links have title attributes that describe the link in greater detail, unless the text of the link already fully describes the target.

When printing pages only valid content is printed. Freeing the user from the frustration of printing web pages neatly and accurately.

In order to ensure a highly accessible outcome this website has achieved compliance certification from various entities such as the W3C. In order to achieve compliance, we have:

1. Followed the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Accessibility Initiative guidelines at http://www.w3.org/tr/wai-webcontent and achieved an 'A' Conformance Level.
2. Followed The Guide to Minimum Website Standards (http://www.agimo.gov.au/practice/mws/accessibility) - Accessibility from the National Office for the Information Economy, and
3. Tested the site with various diagnostic and validation tools. We have achieved conformance through using the Bobby validation service. We have also ensured that our website and the code contained within meet industry standards for technical conformance which in itself lead to greater accessibility.
    

Most browsers support jumping to specific links by typing keys defined on the web site. On Windows, you can press ALT + an access key; on Macintosh, you can press Control + an access key. Pressing ENTER will then take you to that page.

All pages on this site define the following access keys:

Access key + J - Jump straight to the content on a page
Access key + H - Home Page Public Area
Access key + R - Home Page Research Area
Access key + C - Contact Us
Access key + M - Sitemap
Access key + A - Accessibility Statement (this page)
Access key + P - Research Programs
Access key + F - Faculty
Access key + D - Staff Directory
Access key + S - Search Form

All forms can be sent or submited by using the X access key.

The site has been designed to navigate easily and consistently with text only browsers and screen readers. Jump navigation has been provided where appropriate, and all pages contain rel=start, contents, help, next and previous links. Mozilla users can also take advantage of this feature by selecting the View menu, Show/Hide, Site Navigation Bar, Show Only As Needed (or Show Always). Opera 7 has similar functionality.

Where scripted 'pull down' menus are used to make navigating easier for most users redundant text links are provided so that users with javascript disabled are not disadvantaged.

Portable Document Format (PDF) is the open de facto standard for electronic document distribution worldwide. Adobe PDF is a universal file format that preserves all of the fonts, formatting, colours, and graphics of any source document, regardless of the application and platform used to create it. Adobe PDF files are compact and can be shared, viewed, navigated, and printed exactly as intended by anyone with the free Adobe Acrobat Software (http://www.adobe.com/acrobat).

This format is widely used on this website due to the nature of the documents and the requirement for preserving their integrity.

We hope that this site is accessible to you. If you have problems or suggestions on how we can improve this site please email privacy@victorchang.org.au or write to us at:

Address:

Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute 405 Liverpool Street Darlinghurst NSW 2010