Thomas Caravans - Accessibility

What is Accessibility ?

As the creative team behind this site, Alias believe that accessibility is an important component of a great design. We believe that not only should a website look great, but it should be open to as wide a group of people as possible, with differing abilities, needs and software.

An Accessible website is built to adapt to how you, the visitor, uses the internet. It should still function regardless of whether you access it on a Windows PC, PDA, Mobile phone, or some other platform. It should still be accessible if you use an older browser. It should be useable by people who use screen readers, the disabled, or people with poor eyesight.

We try hard to make our websites as accessible as possible. Some of the ways we do this include :-

Text Adaption

Regardless of the browser you are using, you should be able to resize the text using the text size options in your browser. You'll probably have noticed that many websites out there ignore these settings. An Alias Website will resize your text appropiately. Plus, your site will still look great and not 'fall apart' regardless of what text size you choose.

Browser Testing

This website has been tested in the following browsers :-

Microsoft Internet Explorer 6
Microsoft Internet Explorer 5
Opera 8
Opera 8 (in text browser mode)
Firefox 1.5
Netscape 8
Netscape 4 (with css turned off)

This ensures the best possible experience for the software you use.

Built from the Ground Up

Many websites are built with software tools that generate poor, bloated code which only works as expected with certain browsers and offers poor design options and slow page downloads. This website has been hand coded, reviewed and optimised to ensure its great and bug-free behind the scenes.

XHTML 1.0 Transitional & CSS - W3C Validated !

This is where it starts to get a bit more technical (skip the tech talk). You may have heard of HTML. Put simply, XHTML is a more recent, stricter version of HTML, and its use ensures that this website is using the latest, most compliant 'language' for the web. It's built to a standard that not only makes it work as intended in as many browsers as possible, but will continue to work into the foreseeable future as new and updated browsers are released.

Using Cascading Stylesheets ensures that this site will look almost identical in as many browsers as possible.

The W3C are the internet's 'web standards' agency who define the standards to which all good websites should be built. This site has been validated as CSS and XHTML compliant and passed by the W3C's automated testing tools.

W3C Web Content Accessibility Priority 2 (WAI-AA)

As a bonus, this website has also passed all of the automatic checks as defined by the W3C Priority 2 Checklist. This means it has been validated against a checklist of features that the best, most accessible websites, must have. Most sites do not reach this level of conformance.

A Commitment to Accessibility and Good Practice

This website has been developed and reviewed with good intentions to make it meet the needs of as many visitors as possible. We have utilised skip navigation, alt tags and similar accessibility options where ever possible. However, we can never guarantee that it will work in every browser (there are thousands of combinations possible) or meet every persons needs. If you believe that something just isn't working how you would expect it, and this is stopping you from finding out the information you need, please let us know. Your input helps us to review our accessibility guidelines and improve them for websites we have built in the past, present, or future.

Visit www.aliaswebsites.com to find out more and let us know all about your issue.

Regards,

The Alias Websites Team