Walt Gregg's Website

E-mail & Addresses
 

Site Help

Nonresponsiveness

If you have e-mailed but received no response, please call. Because of the plague of spam and automatic spam filtering, there can be no assurance that e-mail to me, or my reply to you, will actually be received.

Accessibility

I intend to support the browser chrome site navigation toolbar. and an on-page site navigation menu bar with access keys. The pages will use valid HTML, valid CSS, and are intended to meet conformance A of web content accessibility guidelines 1 (priority 1 checkpoints) as tested with the Adaptive Technology Resource Center checker. It is hoped that these tests will help make the pages widely accessible, easily indexed, and viewable in any browser. Because the pages were put together at different times for different reasons, many of them do not yet conform. I know about this and plan to fix it. At the least, however, all of the pages should have a link to the home page.  

Site Navigation Toolbar

In your browser's chrome area, you should see the browser's standard web site navigation menu. The chrome area is the area bordering the web page proper. It contains the window frame, menus, toolbars, and scrollbars. Conforming websites use the LINK element (www.euronet.nl/ ~tekelenb/ WWW/ LINK/) to activate the menu. This usually includes links to a few standard website pages, such as home, parent, contents, help, search, author, and copyright, and may include links to various sections of a website. Some browsers, such as iCAB/Mac and Opera 7+ will display the site navigation bar automatically. If you do not see the site navigation menu, you may need to enable it manually.

Webcoder has detailed data and screenshots showing how Link Bars work (webcoder.info/ reference/ LinkBars.html).    

Site Navigation Menu and Access Keys (keyboard shortcuts)

Because some browsers do not support the HTML site navigation toolbar, I have included a site navigation menu near the bottom of each page. Numeric access keys prove a mouse-free method for skipping the page header, jumping to the menu, or jumping directly to individual items on the menu. On the menu bar, the numeric key assignments are indicated by a mouse-over title and by a trailing digit that appears only when the link has been tabbed to. It looks something like this:

Accesskeys0. Home1. Content2. Sitemap3. Search4. This menu bar5. Help6. Up7. Copyright8. Contact9.

Only numeric keys were used to avoid conflicting with browser menu access keys. There is no uniformly observed standard for numbering accesskeys, but I used numbers similar to other sites. See the discussion on Accesskey standards (May 2003) (clagnut.com/ blog/ 193/).

Using the access keys in your browser

Different browsers use different methods to activate the access keys. Here is a partial summary:

Changing the access key prefix in Mozilla browsers

Many people have been troubled by the Mozilla series browsers abandoning the traditional Ctrl+key (Linux) or Alt-key (Windows) method. This can be changed, but this is entirely at your own risk. In about:config, enter the filter 'ui.key'. Locate ui.key.generalAccessKey (kb.mozillazine.org/ UI.key.generalAccessKey), and if you wish change it to 17 (Ctrl/Linux) or 18 (Alt/Windows). This reverts to behavior where web page access keys preempt browser menu access keys. If that's a problem, you might try changing ui.key.menuAccesskey (kb.mozillazine.org/ UI.key.menuAccesskey) to 27 (Esc). You have to restart the browser for this to take effect.

Accesskey problems?

Numeric access keys are reported to be unsupported by some assistive technologies, such as IBM Home Page Reader and Windows Eyes. However, those systems have other means to help navigate pages. In other cases if you need access key support but your browser lacks it, you may need to upgrade. Accesskey suport is believed to be present in browsers beginning with the version listed here, but this list is neither authoritative nor complete:

  1. Designed to be cross platform and available for Linux, Mac, Windows, and even OS/2:
  2. Designed for one of the Linux Desktops:
  3. Designed for the Mac Desktop:
  4. Designed for the Windows Desktop:

Problems?

Should you actually have any difficulty accessing anything here, please e-mail me. I've put some effort into testing the pages to make sure they can be accessed in a variety of browsing environments. I'd really like to hear about it if they don't work in yours.

W. Gregg, Site Help (2008-02-29) (http://w-gregg.juneau.ak.us/ latest/ text/ sitehelp).

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