BURNABY, British Columbia, August 23, 2010 – Persons with all types of disabilities, including those with visual impairments, will benefit from steps taken by the Neil Squire Society to ensure its new website, neilsquire.ca, is fully accessible. The Society strove to meet the highest WCAG 2.0 (new window) accessibility standards set out by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C (new window)). The Society’s full accessibility statement is available on their website: https://www.neilsquire.ca/accessibility-statement/
“The accessibility of our new website reconfirms the Neil Squire Society as a strong leader in promoting web accessibility for all Canadians with disabilities,” said Harry Monk, a member of the Neil Squire Society’s Board of Directors. “As a blind person who relies on JAWS (new window) , a text to speech screen reader to browse the web, I found that neilsquire.ca presents information in a logical sequence making good use of headings and links that provide additional information on any topic. The headings and links are easy to navigate using JAWS (new window) and I suspect all other quality text to speech screen readers.”
Neilsquire.ca was designed in-house by e-Learning Program Coordinator and Computer Programmer, Ryan Thomas, and incorporates a number of accessibility and usability features. The site was designed with a range of visitors in mind, including those who use screen readers, magnification technology, high contrast settings, and those who rely on their keyboard to navigate instead of a mouse.
Key accessible features of the website include: accessible themes including big text, high contrast, and mobile; elastic layout that behaves properly when zoomed to approximately 250%; forms and fields are coded in an accessible manner; headings are coded in a way that is sensible to screen readers; JavaScript (new window) was kept out of the interface to make all content accessible; styling is such that the standard and high contrast themes look the same across Firefox (new window) , Internet Explorer (new window) , Opera (new window) , Chrome (new window) and Safari (new window).
About the Neil Squire Society
The Neil Squire Society is the only not-for-profit organization in Canada that for the past 25 years has used technology, knowledge and passion to empower Canadians with physical disabilities. The Society has developed innovative programs and services and some of the world’s leading edge assistive technology for people with physical disabilities. More than 20,000 people with disabilities in Canada have benefited from the work of the Society. With about fifty staff, the Neil Squire Society has offices and provides services to Canadian in Vancouver, Regina, Ottawa, Fredericton, and Moncton, as well as to many small communities across Canada via distance education.
If you’d like more information about this topic, please contact Suzanne Cross by phone at 604-473-9363 or by e-mail at suzannec@neilsquire.ca.
Distribution of this press release was generously donated by Marketwire (new window).