We are committed to providing information and services that are fully accessible to people with disabilities.
Page layout and navigation
Most pages on the website are structured as follows:
- Global links: Language Selection, Text Sizer, Contact Details, Subscriptions, Sitemap (insert names of other pages in footer)
- Main navigation: links to the main sections of the web site Home, About Us, Integrated Marine Plan, News & Events, , Publications, Contact Us
- Bread crumb trail: states where you are on the web site now and provides a trail of links from there to the home page.
- Search box: can be used to search for keywords on our website. Search box is located on top right hand corner on every web page.
- Section Navigation: The main navigation shows all main content pages and a list of their subpages when you hover over headings. The homepage has placeholders with direct links to Integrated Marine Plan, Publications, News, HOOW Conference & Events, and Latest News items. The homepage also has a slider image.
- Content: Main content for that page, structured using headings and paragraph elements.
Standards compliance
The Marine Institute maintains Our Ocean Wealth website in conjunction with Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine on behalf of the inter-departmental Marine Coordination Group, and are committed to maintaining this web site in accordance with priority 1 and 2 of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and the Irish National Disability Authority Guidelines for Web Accessibility. Work on compliance with these guidelines is ongoing, so while all new content should be compliant, some older content may not adhere to these standards at the moment.
The availability of our font sizer allows text to be resized appropriately across multiple devices and platforms.
The website uses structured semantic markup. H1 tags are used for main titles, H2,H3, H4 and H5 tags for subtitles.
The website uses cascading style sheets for visual layout. This ensures that content is perfectly linearised and improves performance on a wide range of browsers and other user agents.
Maintaining accessibility
To help deliver and maintain an accessible website, internal guidelines to guide web administrators and authors in the creation of accessible web content is in place.
These guidelines cover issues such as:
- Creating user friendly web content
- Writing meaningful alternative text
- Creating accessible tables
- Creating accessible forms
- Creating accessible link phrases