Accessibility Statement

This statement outlines the Kalvos & Damian New Music Bazaar's (called "K&D" in this statement) accessibility principles for the entire K&D website and its mirrors.

This statement outlines the following:

1. K&D's accessibility policy and progress.
2. How K&D creates its web pages.
3. What guidelines K&D uses for accessibility.
4. K&D's current site design.
5. How to comment to K&D on accessibility issues.

Questions regarding this statement should be directed to K&D (Contact Form).

Accessibility Policy

K&D makes every attempt to create accessible web pages. Accessibility includes handicapped access as well as access for all Web devices, such as palmtops. These features include:

• Descriptive text links for all images other than decorative icons (completed).
• Descriptive inline link names (in progress for older pages).
• Clear navigation and screen presentation (completed; see About the February 2003 Site Design, below).
• Transcripts of audio contents where possible (in progress).
• No use of frames, automatic redirects, design tables for text, reverse text, embedded sounds, highly patterned backgrounds, or other techniques that may create access barriers (completed).
• Styles sheets are used for access compatibility (completed; see About the February 2003 Site Design, below).
• Image map header is duplicated by a text footer on every page (both replaced by left-side navigation; see About the February 2003 Site Design, below).
• Limitation of scripts to non-essential design features; this does not include composer-created scripts and applets.
• Though occasional popups are used for urgent messages, an on-page link is always provided.

K&D accessibility is far from complete. Some of our page contents date to 1995, before many of these issues were discussed or solutions presented.

• We are aware that the links to interviews and music on K&D composer pages are inadequately described.
• We are seeking funding to transcribe all our audio interviews with composers. Presently (October 2001) only four of approximately 160 interviews are transcribed.
• We are not yet including longdesc attributes and "d" links, nor title information. The title attribute was developed after K&D began its website.

How K&D Pages are Created

All K&D web pages are presently created by hand, without WYSIWYG editors or automated tools. We do not use a database. As such, our pages are first validated and then combed for accessibility issues before posting.

Guidelines K&D Follows

K&D pages are created to adhere to the first level of the Web Accessibility Initiative of the World Wide Web Consortium, and to follow the guidelines of The Transitive Empire and OrbitAccess. Earlier pages are brought up to date when possible.

We test our site for accessibility using standard evaluation tools, including the WAI checklist, Bobby, Lynx, IBM Home Page Reader, and a Palm V.

About the February 2003 Site Design

The K&D site design undertaken in February 2003 is another step toward accessibility.

• Nearly all table content used for site layout has been removed (not that there was very much to start with, but it tended to creep in)
• Pages now render 100% for speech browsing.
• A "skip this menu" link has been added to the navigation bar for speech/Braille/text browsing.
• The image navigation used in the previous design has been removed.
• Additional navigation has been added to every page rather than depending on a site map.
• The <iframe> headline scroll deprecates nicely (and its information is duplicated on our bulletin board), and is properly tagged for speech reading.

All pages use style sheets. This style sheet-based design change does require that style sheets be enabled. For visual browsers, that's the default setting. But those who browse with scripting turned off may discover that style sheets do not function.

Our style sheet design affects how several of our older pages are rendered. In the years from 1995-98, we did not 'containerize' all of paragraph tags, and left some text in the body without tags. This is not smoothly displayed in our style sheets. Nothing is missing, but it's a cosmetic touch-up we'll take care of later.

This change is a step toward server-based "include" content that is common to every page and database-driven playlists, record labels, composer info, etc. Those are both in the future, however, as it may make K&D too server-dependent and not portable. We shall see.

Note: This site does not function correctly in Netscape 4.0. A bug in Netscape causes an Error -336 with certain standard stylesheet commands which it does not implement and should ignore. It is not the fault of the Kalvos & Damian site. The only solution is to use a different browser (the 4.0 and 4.7 series of Netscape browsers was problematic).

August 2003 Update

• The <iframe> headline scroll has been removed. This has been replaced by an <iframe> scripted Google banner ad, whose presentation is not under the control of K&D. They are ignored by speech browsers and deprecate correctly to earlier browsers.

Comments

You are invited to comment on our accessibility and to suggest improvements. We ask that you bear in mind that this is a volunteer site unable to employ User Agent identification to serve unique web pages to each browser. You may comment to K&D at Contact Form.

Contacting the Web Site

If you have any questions about this accessibility statement, the practices of this site, or your dealings with this website, you can email K&D at Contact Form.

First posted September 16, 1999; revised November 28, 1999; revised October 15, 2001; revised February 23, 2003; revised March 5, 2003; Revised September 1, 2003.