After reading the messages in this thread I decided to see what I could do to make the website I edit more accessible to a user with low vision. Our site is that of the Washington DC-based regional office of a North American organization (the URJ) that gives supporting services to Reform Jewish Congregations across the US and Canada (Our Mid-Atlantic Regional office serves 70 congregations). I didn't understand all that was said in the thread, and I have a very limited knowledge of HTML. The web-editing software I use is organization-supplied. Mostly I use its WYSIWYG editor, but I can sometimes tweak the HTML. We've had fairly skimpy training on using this web-building software. Following the suggestions in the thread, I went back into the HTML and gave descriptive tags to any images on our site - logos and photos (I didn't bother fixing the somewhat outdated, large photo album). I'm now going to tag the old .pdfs also. For any new files and images I'll be sure to add a description at the outset - I did not realize the necessity before. The BBC article GUEST Jon linked to was especially helpful. After reading it, I brought this accessibility issue to the attention of our N.A. Headquarters web administrators and as a result they will now be adding this as a requirement in the web style manual for the URJ North American main site and the 13 other Regional sites. Yay, Mudcat! I'm now getting ready to put in a lot of new text, and it contains many links - I'm getting a lot of this third-hand. Congregations email these news items to our Director, she edits and sends them to me in a Word document full of links, and I am to post this on our website – by copy-and-pasting. The concern that I have regards scaling up. All my web-editing so far has been in Internet Explorer, with Text Size set to Medium. So I tried magnifying my view of our site, with Text Size set to Largest, and some things scaled up fine, but others stayed just as small --particularly links to other pages or sites. So I don't really understand how to control the text size evenly -especially when using pasted links. I also tried downloading and using Opera, as Geoff the Duck had suggested in another thread. Opera magnifies everything equally – I went up to 400% - but it doesn't display any of my new "Alt" tags for the images or files! Also I have NO idea how friendly our site is to any kind of speech-reader. I tried running the home page of our site through the w3c markup validator, and the report showed 247 errors, lots of ominous red, and several exclamation points!!! But the main N.A. Headquarters' site got nearly as bad a report, so I think the web-editing software (over which I have no control) might be to blame. If anyone has more info or hints, that would be SO great! Linda
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