Accessibility Statement and other Technical Information

Accessibility

This site was constructed following the accessibility guidelines set up by the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) as much as was possible. Accessibility refers to creating a site so that it is more usable for all people including those with disabilities involving sight, movement and/or hearing and is device independent. Device independent means that the content of a web site should be accessible to people using any one of a number of different browsing devices including PDA's, refreshable Braille displays, etc.

Access keys are special keyboard shortcuts used by holding down the alt key with other keys as defined by a particular web site.

Access keys for this site are defined as follows:

0 = Accessibility Statement and other Technical Information
1 = Home or Main page of site
2 = Skip navigation link at top of each page

Skip navigation links are included on the top of all pages, except the printer versions of articles. An additional skip navigation link appears towards the bottom of pages for skipping the text navigation at the bottom of the page. Many pages have more information in the right column which can be accessed more quickly using this link. Skip navigation links move the focus of the browsing software to the main content of the page. This can be helpful to people using screen reader software so they can avoid listening to a list of links repeated at the top of every page. People with limited mobility sometimes use these links along with the Tab key rather than using a mouse.

Another technique utilized by All Science Stuff.com is CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) for page layout. CSS is the preferred method of the WAI for positioning to increase accessibility of a web page. Older versions of some popular browsers are not standards compliant and may not be able to properly display a page using CSS positioning. The Web Standards Project is a coalition that supports "standards that ensure simple, affordable access to web technologies for all". Their Browser Upgrade Campaign was set up to encourage users of older browsers to upgrade to standards-compliant browers.

Some articles contain small Flash animations to help explain complex concepts. Everything in the these animations is also explained in the main text of the article. A skip over Flash animation link is included as needed because some browsers will not allow focus to go back to a page in which Flash is embedded once it is given to the Flash animation.

A text only printer version is also available for each article. Since the articles are pulled from a database, the text of the printer versions is identical to the regular version.

Additional Technical Information

All Science Stuff.com does not use javascript of any kind - no popup or popunder ads will appear from browsing this site. If you do see something like this while visiting All Science Stuff.com your computer may be infected with scumware or adware. Scumware is software that is sometimes unknowingly installed on computers. You can check to see if yours if infected by visiting Scumware.com, as well as get additional information about this problem.

All Science Stuff.com is written in XHTML 1.0 transitional. XHTML is a reformulation of HTML as an XML application. XHTML allows for greater flexibility and portability for potential use on many different kinds of browsing devices, such as hand helds, televisions, cars, telephones, etc. XHTML code also separates the structure of a web page from its presentation. This is important for accessibility as well as for the browsing devices listed above, which may not be able to display a document unless the code is properly written.

Linking to this site

Please feel free to link to either the main page or any article on AllScienceStuff.com. If linking to an individual article, please include the article title in the link text. If you choose to link to the site with an image one of the following small versions of the logo can be used (just right click, save, and upload to your server).

(skip text navigation)