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Accessibility Statement for Film & Sound Online

This is the official accessibility statement for the Film & Sound Online service. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to contact us on edina@ed.ac.uk.

Access keys

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 (depending on which browser you use).

All the pages in this service define the access keys noted below:

  • Access key 4 - Home (Standard Search)
  • Access key 5 - Advanced Search
  • Access key 6 - Collections
  • Access key 7 - Subjects
  • Access key 8 - Search History
  • Access key 9 - Help
  • Access key 0 - Exit

Standards compliance

  1. The pages within the Film & Sound Online service comply with all priority 1 guidelines of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, except for the following important exception: the downloadable films are not encoded for accessibility. Please see the section "Accessibility of the downloaded films" below for more details.
  2. The pages within the Film & Sound Online service should validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional.
  3. Where applicable, pages in this service use structured semantic markup. h1 tags are used for main titles, h2 tags and lower for subtitles.

Navigation

  1. Every page has a global toolbar. This precedes the main content of the page, and includes the following links: "Home" (meaning the home page of the interface, which is also the Standard Search page), "Advanced Search", "Collections", "Subjects", "Search History", "Help" and "Exit".
  2. Every page has a standard footer. This contains five links: "Terms of Use", "FAQs", "Accessibility","Contact" and "Disclaimer"

Links

  1. Links are written to make sense out of context.
  2. Where images are used as the link item, the alt text of the image should be the same as the title text for both the image and the link.
  3. When a link leads away from the web site, a new browser window will open. This should be noted in the title of the link.

Images

  1. Any content images used in this service include descriptive alt attributes. Purely decorative graphics include null alt attributes.

Visual design

  1. This service uses some tables for visual layout. Where used solely for layout purposes, table headers are not used.
  2. This service uses only relative font sizes, compatible with the user-specified "text size" option in visual browsers.
  3. Style sheets are used to designate visual styles and some positioning.
  4. If your browser or browsing device does not support stylesheets at all, the content of each page is still readable.

Accessibility of the downloadable films

Due to limited resources, the downloadable films have not been encoded with accessibility features such as captioning for the hearing-impaired or a descriptive soundtrack for the visually-impaired.

We suggest that lecturers who wish to use the films in coursework download and use one of the free video editing software packages available to add captioning for the hearing impaired, and/or a descriptive audio soundtrack to the downloaded films for the visually impaired:

  1. Media Access Generator (MAGpie), a free Open Source application. (MAGpie is a Java2 application which runs on Windows 9x/NT/2000/XP and on Mac OSX.)
  2. iMovie, which comes free with Apple Macs with the OS X operating system
  3. Microsoft Movie Maker, which comes free with Windows XP Service Pack 2