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Information on Screen Readers(*)

This site presents information about services for people with a learning disability and/or with a physical or sensory impairment in Fife in a format accessible to the greatest number of potential users. Should you have difficulties navigating or reading this site, we would welcome your constructive feedback. Just e-mail us at info@fifeadultdayservices.org.uk.

Graphics and Text

The main interface combines text, menus and graphics to guide visitors around the site. However, some users may prefer a text-only interface as it downloads faster and is more compatible with screen-readers used by many with sensory impairments. Visitors can easily switch from the default graphics-enhanced to the text-only interface either by clicking text-only or graphics-enhanced or by using the keyboard shortcut Alt or Control (Mac) + Z. This works throughout the site, but please note images and video are not available in the text-only interface.

Text Size

Use the three A signs at the top left next to the Text-only selector to make the body text slighly larger or much larger than the default size. These settings complement your browser's text-size or zoom controls described below.

  • IE 7+
  • Firefox 3+,
  • Chrome 4+,
  • Safari 4+
  • Opera
Press control or command (Mac) with the + and - keys to enlarge or shrink the whole page. On IE7+ and Firefox on Windows you can also use your mouse's scroll wheel with the control key to change text size.

In Safari you may also add a text size icon to the address bar by selecting View > Customize and then dragging the extra icons you require. Opera and IE8 have a page zoom control in the status bar.

  • Internet
    Explorer 6
Hold down the Control key and turn the scroll wheel of your mouse to increase or decrease the standard font size. Alternatively select text size from the View menu. If you use this feature regularly you may wish to place a text size icon on your browser toolbar (right-click on toolbar > select customise).
  • Firefox 1 & 2
  • Safari 1, 2 & 3
Hold down the Control or Command (Mac) key and press the + or - keys (on the keyboard) to increase or decrease the standard font size. In Safari you may also choose Make Text Bigger or Make Text Smaller from the View menu.

Designing a Website to enable users to resize text to suit their monitor and eyesight is probably the single most important accessibility feature.

Browser Compatibility

This site has been tested on Internet Explorer 7 and 8, Firefox 3+, Safari 5+ on the Mac and iPhone, Google Chrome 4+ and Opera 10+. While it is optimised for newer browsers, it should still work in IE6, still installed on some council machines, but some expanding menus may not work as smoothly. As this site uses stylesheets for layout and formatting, it will not display correctly in legacy browsers such a Netscape 4.7 or Internet Explorer 4.0 and has not been tested in IE 5.5. We recommend users of older browsers upgrade to a newer version, if possible, by following the hyperlinks above.

NB: Installing alternative browsers will not remove your current browser, though you may be prompted to use it as your default, however upgrading IE on Windows or Safari on Mac will replace the previous version. All new Web sites are built to work best newer browsers.

Screen Area

The main graphics-enhanced and text-only sections both stretch to fill the browser window up to a maximum width of 1024 pixels. Below this resolution the header is not entirely visible, but the main body will contract to a minimum width of 800 pixels in graphics mode. The text-only interface should scale nicely on most devices, even mobile phones.

Search Facility

The site comprises a full text search facility. You may search one or more words with the following options:

  1. All words: if you enter more than one word, all whole words must occur in the text, but not necessarily in the typed order, e.g. football team will match a sentence such as "The team played football", but not texts that only contain football or team or partial matches such as "footballers played for the team".
  2. Any words: If you enter more than one word, this option is likely to increase the number of matches, e.g. football team may return an article that includes the word team, but has nothing to do with football.
  3. Exact phrase: This search mode matches the exact sequence of letters and requires at least 4 letters. Unlike the other search modes it will match partial words, e.g. football will match "footballers", but football team will not match "the team played football"

Printing

All pages have a Printer-friendly Page link, which will display only the main body of text without the header, side menu or footer with black text on a white background. Related links and articles will also be excluded.

All pages have a special print stylesheet, recognised by the latest browsers (IE 6.0+ and Firefox 1+, Safari 1+, Chrome 2+ and Opera 6.0+), which will achieve the same effect if you click on the toolbar print icon or select print from the file menu. To print text only (i.e. without foreground graphics), switch to text-only mode first and refresh (reload) the page if you were previously in graphics mode.

Screen Readers: Text-to-Speech Software Compatibility

This site is fully compatible with screen readers or speech synthesisers that reproduce text as speech such as the speech tools integrated into Mac OS X and Windows Vista and 7. Firefox users on all platforms can install a free plug-in called Fire Vox, while Internet Explorer users on Windows XP may consider TextAloud available for a trial download and then a modest fee. However, other viable freeware options may be available. This feature is of particular interest to people with visual impairments, reading difficulties or wish to surf the web via mobile devices. The site features an aural stylesheet instructing the screen reader how to emphasise or whether to read text. You may find it more convenient just to highlight the text you would like to listen to and then activate the read control.

Keyboard Accessibility

The site is easy to navigate with a standard keyboard using IE 6.0+, Mozilla 1.0+ (Firefox, Camino, Netscape 6.0+ etc.) and Safari. Simple combinations of Alt key (Control key on the Mac) with a number or letter help you navigate between the main sections of the site.

NB: If Javascript is disabled (it is enabled by default in most modern browsers), the access keys will not work automatically in Internet Explorer (i.e. you'll need to press Enter after the access key) and the pop-up menus and the print this page button will not work at all.

Video, Audio and Flash Player

Videos, sound clips and some presentations use Flash Player to integration with the rest of the Web page, but even devices without Flash, can play the widely supported mp3 and mp4 formats used respectively for audio and video. For sound and animation you just need Flash Player 7+, but for compatiblity with the H.264 video codec, you'll need Flash Player 9+. Most computers already meet these requirements, though Flash Player may not be correctly configured on your system. Flash Player 10 s available for all major desktop operating systems (Windows XP, Vista and 7 as well as Max OS 10.3+ and Linux 2.6+). For older systems such as Window 98 or 2000, you may only be able to install Flash Player 9. Flash is not yet available for mobile operating systems such as the iPhone, although sound files will play in a standalone player.

Should you experience any problems, download an updated Flash Player from the Adobe Flash Player download site. You will need adminitrator access to your computer to do so. Online installation usually takes no longer than 5 minutes even with a slow Internet connection. Please be aware that videos may take a while to start on slow Internet connections.

PDF Files

Some documents with special formatting such as newsletters are made available as PDF (Portable Document Format) files that require Adobe (Acrobat) Reader or other PDF Viewers such as Preview preinstalled on Mac OS X, Foxit on Windows, Evince or KPDF on Linux. Adobe Reader can be downloaded free of charge from Adobe Reader Download.

Javascript and Acessible Plain HTML

Although the site uses Javascript for many effects and features as well as Flash for audio and video, all core text content is available as static HTML even if you have javascript disabled, use assistive technology or mobile browsers with incomplete Javascript support.

Special Javascript Effects

Many effects and usability enhancements such as the sliding menus and slideshows rely on Javascript. If this is disabled for any reason, you will see expanded menus and a static series of photographs. The text-size switcher also uses Javascript. These scripts use the JQuery library tested on IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox 3, Chrome 2+ and Safari 3+ (Mac, iPhone and Windows). They are not guaranteed to work on legacy browsers such as IE5 or on some mobile browsers and may be jerky on older supported browsers such IE6 or Firefox 1.5. JQuery has received endorsements from many large IT and media organisations, ranging from the Drupal Project and Mozilla foundation to Microsoft and Nokia.

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