The Nut Graph is committed to making its website accessible to as many people in society as possible, including the disabled.
We have begun incorporating web accessibility features in May 2009 to make most of the articles and functions more disabled-friendly from this point.
This means the website’s design and content are presented in a way that is friendly to the assistive technology that the disabled use on their computers.
Given our limited resources at this stage, we are unable to make everything on this site, including past articles, accessible for all types of disability.
However, we will continue to improve the web accessibility features and comply with standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium‘s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines where we can. It will be an on-going process.
We welcome any feedback that will help us achieve this. If you have questions or suggestions, please e-mail them to cindytham@thenutgraph.com.
Accessibility features on The Nut Graph
Disabled-friendly view option
This removes unnecessary visual materials, scrolling/blinking text or pop-up windows, and allows the text size to be increased, to make reading easier for those with partial vision or age-related conditions.
Images
Images are accompanied by alternative text in the html source code, which can be perceived by screen readers, as a way to provide more helpful or informative descriptions of the images to visitors using such assistive technology.
Tables
Tables are created in html (instead of being presented in image format) and have row and column headers so that they can be easily read by screen readers.
Navigation
The web page structure is designed to have a logical and predictable tab order (left to right, top to bottom), for the benefit of people who use the keyboard and not the mouse to navigate. <h1> tags are used to demarcate the title which is the start of an article, to help visitors using screen readers and other assistive technologies to skip all the sections in the navigation bar if they want and jump straight to the article.
Others
Due to limited resources, we are unable to provide speech-to-text conversion for audio materials, and synchronised caption for video and multimedia materials. However, we will provide a short description of the content in the caption or article text, to inform visitors with visual or hearing disabilities what the content is about. We will also avoid using instructions or descriptions like “Click here” or “Click on the word in bold/blue” or “The picture on the right”, as these would not be helpful information to people with visual disabilities.
Related article
A disabled-friendly website, which includes an interview with Silatul Rahim Dahman, information communications and technology manager at the Malaysian Association for the Blind.
Web accessibility resources
- World Wide Web Consortium
- Web Accessibility Initiative
- How people with disabilities use the web
- Web Accessibility in Mind
Links to some free or open source assistive technologies
