The Manitoba Association for Rights and Liberties is committed to providing equal access for all and that commitment is reflected in the design of these pages.
Web pages are frequently designed in ways that make it difficult for people with disabilities to access the content. Pages that rely heavily on graphics cannot be read by screen readers for the blind. Low contrast colour schemes and font sizes that are too small are a problem for the visually impaired.
Accessible design is a series of principles and techniques which make the content of web pages available to all users regardless of their disabilities. Accessible design also benefits non-disabled users by making web pages easier to read with new types of hardware such as palm sized devices
MARL has implemented a number of principles of accessible design in these pages.
- All pages have been coded used Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) according to the standards developed by the World Wide Web Consortium
- The basic colour scheme has been chosen to offer good contrast to most users, including those with colour deficient vision.
- An optional high contrast colour scheme is also available.
- All fonts can be resized by the user with the "Text Size" option on the "View" menu of most browsers.
- Use of graphics has been kept to a minimum.
The pages on this site should be viewable with any browser that supports web standards. They have been tested on Internet Explorer 6.0 and 7.0 and Firefox 2 and 3. for Windows. Users with earlier browser versions will find that some design features will not be properly displayed but all of the text content on the site should be readable with any browser.
The following are some pages with information on accessibility and web standards:
- A List Apart - Articles and practical advice on various aspects of web design
- The World Wide Web Consortium Web Accessibility Initiative - Technical information on web standards
- Building Accessible Web Sites by Joe Clark - Online book on accessible design
In the summer of 2008 the site was re-designed to implement the Drupal content managment system.