"Web accessibility means that people with disabilities can use the Web. More specifically, Web accessibility means that people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with the Web, and that they can contribute to the Web. Web accessibility also benefits others, including older people with changing abilities due to aging." (Web Accessibility Initiative: Introduction to Web Accessibility)
Material on this site should represent the most important parts of information first, and then expand from there towards the end of the page. In some contexts you might bump into this sort of implementation under the term "inverted pyramid writing" or "IPW". Thanks to this approach the user can quickly decide whether current page is useful.
Internet - as a written media – differs from books and newspaper, albeit being closer to the latter. Readability is enhanced e.g. with subheadings, lists, short paragraphs and short sentences. These help finding the correct information even from a large blocks of text.
Instead of using difficult and ambiguous acronyms or jargon, we intend to connect with the end user by talking user’s language. Part of being a professional is knowing how to explain your hard-to-grasp concept in layman’s terms.
Content and presentation have been separated on this site. For instance, if you try to print this page, it is being transformed into a more paper-readable format while the content stays unaltered. Similar transformation is applied to mobile phones and PDA’s that show the layout that has been designed to fit a small screen. Other possible devices might be a screen reader or a text-based web browser.
Most of the times accessibility is about using pure common sense and retaining in standard ways of representing information. So why should this be raised up as a special issue?
The sheer volume of different technical options, various acting patterns of people and mere laziness sometimes make things more difficult that they ought to be. That’s why downright guidelines are quite often useful.
The site should work with every possible terminal device. If your device is not showing some page, or you find it hard to use, please contact Jussi and describe the problem; we’ll do our best to fix the problem immediately.