Accessibility Guidelines for publishing on NFU Online
Accessibility Guidelines for publishing on NFU Online
The following list outlines the NFU Online agreed guidelines for accessibility.
Publishers must be responsive to any and all comments relating to problems accessing the content of their pages.
Text
Body text should be specified using the following font-family definition:
arial, verdana, helvetica, sans-serif
Block letters underlines should not be used.
Clarity
Ensure content on your pages is clear, succinct and scan able.
Links
Text used within links should be comprehensible within the general context of the page they are on, without relying on any more specific context provided by any immediately surrounding content. For instance, text such as "click here" or "more information" is not acceptable.
Make text links descriptive so that they can be understood when taken out of context e.g.:
'See Crop details for more information ' not ' Click here for more information'
Where a mailto link is used, the email address being referenced should appear either as the text for the link, or immediately preceding or following the link.
Colour
Colour should not be used exclusively to convey any information necessary to the comprehension or navigation of content.
Graphics
All graphics used to convey any information of any kind, navigational, literal or representational, must have meaningful alt tags.
The <alt> attribute in the image tag provides a way for you to include a text description for each visual element you have on a web page. This text is displayed when you hold your mouse over an image. Screen readers read the ALT text when they encounter an image. You should use this attribute for all images, image maps, audio and video.
All graphics used purely in the construction of the page design or layout should have empty alt tags.
All graphics should have width and height attributes set.
Graphics used within pages should be either gif's or jpeg's, saved at 72dpi. File sizes should be optimised as far as possible, without the quality of the image degrading to an unacceptable level. The width and height used within pages should be 175pxl width by 125pxl height.
Tables
Tables used to present truly tabular information ("data tables") should use the "summary" attribute of the "table" element to carry a description of the data within the table.
Tables used purely in the construction of the page design or layout should either omit the table "summary" attribute or employ a table "summary" attribute with an empty value.
Page Design/Layout
Pages should be constructed in a manner that allows the content to be rendered within a width of 300 characters while still remaining readable and navigable. It is understood that occasionally some content, by its very nature, may need to be reproduced with a width that necessitates a greater display area than this. However, these instances should be treated as exceptions, and should not effect the compliance of the remaining pages within a site.
