Oultwood

Site Accessibility

Site web page design

The Oultwood site has been specifically written with accessibility in mind. To achieve good accessibility, the site contains:

All of the pages on this site have been been specially written for fast loading. The average page size is about 10k, with the largest being 47k (the html color palet) page, followed by the downsized dcp results) at 30k.

Any table considered too large has been split into a number of smaller ones to minimise the time taken to display a page.

The graphics used on the site have been specially compressed and most are under 5k in size although a few of the colour maps are slightly larger Some of the smaller graphics are less than 100 bytes.

The graphics used on this site are shared amoungst all pages. This means that they are only downloaded once. This also help to make other pages load faster.

All links on this site are normally checked every other month, so all should be valid. The spider used for this is called cyberspider. It is a good product which gives detailed reports on the state of both internal and external links.

External web site links that are have been found to be invalid are marked with the icon .

Blue has been used as the external link colour (purple for internal links) with black for normal text because these colours produce high readability when used on a yellow background. The use of a high contrast colour combination is of especial benefit to the partially sighted. Links that have been visited change colour to green. For more information on good screen colour combinations, have a look at the html colour chart page.

At the bottom of most pages there is a link to take you back to the 'top' of the page.

The site has been designed to work with most browsers and is best viewed using 800 x 600 or better. The background graphic on the old format pages is a low-res. colour graphic one pixel high but wide enough to cope with all current display formats. If you experience problems with a particular browser, version of browser or screen size, let me know and we will try and fix it.

None of the pages of this site contain frames.

The background colours used with this site have been especially chosen to give high contrast, this is important to ensure that all users can read the contents of every page. All web page producers should be aware that a significant proportion of web users are partially or even totally blind. High contrast is of vital importance to this class of user.

The total blind use special software to view web sites. This software makes particular use of the alt attribute with < img > tag. Tt is therefore important to use alt to give a clear description of the graphic rather than just say 'big graphic'.

To achieve fast and readable html, all pages have been written using the windows text editor 'notepad'.

The html/xhtml source has been formatted so that it is easy to follow.

If you find that a particular page is slow to load, please let us know so that we can take steps to increase its performance.

To help you find the Oultwood link within your favourites list (make sure you add it), an appropriate 'favicon' has been produced for each directory. If you are using Microsoft Explorer 5 or later and want to see what I mean, add Oultwood to your favourites list by clicking the 'favorites' menu item and then choosing 'add to favorites'. For example, if the html colour page is one of your favourites, you will see the icon.

When you make Oultwood one of your favourites, you should see the Oultwood icon on your favourites link - very few other sites offer this feature.

If you want Oultwood to help you produce some web pages, have a look at our web services site.

If you use the Oultwood LG index to help you contact a council, please let them know that you used Oultwood to find them.