University College Plymouth St Mark & St John

• Valid XHTML and CSS: Our corporate pages are written in valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional and styled using valid CSS2 code. We validate our pages regularly to ensure this standard is maintained.
• Accessibility: The College recommends compliance with the WCAG 1.0 AA standard, and this is the standard we have applied to the corporate webpages. Some of the guidelines require interpretation and we have used informed judgement to implement them with the needs of users foremost in mind. In some instances we have gone beyond the basic requirements where we have felt it necessary; for example, in providing a 'skip to main content' link on each page which, whilst invisible to most users, is available to those using screenreaders and which also becomes visible on tabbing to it. We have working methods in place to try to maintain this level of accessibility.

Standards and guidelines do not necessarily address all accessibility problems, so we particularly encourage anyone having difficulties using our site to contact us directly so we can fix any outstanding problems. Comments on any matter concerning the College home pages, including the accessibility of our pages, can be sent to the Web Co-ordinator.

Navigation Aids

We have incorporated the following features into the College site to help you find your way around:

• Search box
  • A search box allowing you to type in search terms and search the College site is available on every page.
  • Advanced search options are available from the search results page.
• Sitemap
  • If you are having any trouble locating the information you are looking for, a full sitemap of the site is available from the bottom menu on every page.
• Breadcrumb trail
  • We provide a breadcrumb trail feature above the main content of each page to show you the path from the home page to where you are in the site.
• 'Skip to main content' link
  • We have included a ‘Skip to main content’ link at the start of all our standard pages to enable screenreader users and those tabbing through links to bypass the page banner and navigation links and go straight to the main content of each page. This link is designed to be invisible in graphic browsers most of the time, but if you tab through the page links, it will become visible once you focus on it. The link is also available to be read by screenreaders.
• Links
  • We try to ensure all our link text is written to make sense out of context.
  • We have used title attributes where appropriate to give further information about the target of a link.
• Presentation
  • We use stylesheets for visual layout combined with structured markup of headings, paragraphs and lists to separate content from presentation.
  • The content of our pages is still readable if stylesheets are turned off or unavailable.
  • We have used relative font sizes on our pages to ensure text is resizeable in visual browsers. See instructions for how to resize text in different browsers.
• Images
  • All content images have alt text providing equivalent text to describe their function.
  • Purely decorative images have empty alt text, i.e. alt="", which means screen readers ignore the images completely