This website has been built to conform to the highest accessibility standards. This page contains the official accessibility statement for www.loirevalleyretreat.com.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to contact us. If you are not familiar with accessibility issues, we recommend you visit the "Dive into accessibility" website at www.diveintoaccessibility.org.

Standards compliance

1. All pages on this site is WCAG AA approved, complying wih the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Again, this is a judgement call; many guidelines are intentionally vague and can not be tested automatically. We have reviewed all the guidelines and believe that all these pages are in compliance.
2. 

Links

1. Many links have title attributes which describe the link in greater detail, unless the text of the link already fully describes the target (such as the headline of an article).
2. Links are written to make sense out of context.

Images

1. All content images used in this site include descriptive ALT attributes. Purely decorative graphics include null ALT attributes.
2. In addition, some images have been moved into the background where possible.

Visual design

1. This site uses cascading style sheets for visual layout.
2. This site uses only relative font sizes, compatible with the user-specified "text size" option in visual browsers.
3. If your browser or browsing device does not support stylesheets at all, the content of each page is still readable.

Browser Compatibility

We have ensured that the website template set displays on all current browsers including Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Opera 9+, Firefox 3+ and Mozilla/Netscape 7+, Safari 3+, Google Chrome. If you do not have one of these, we recommend you upgrade as these browsers support web standards which in turn support the provision of fully functional web services for all users.

Tables

Where tables are used, we endeavor to ensure that they are written using semantic markup which includes properly labeled header cells to allow screen readers to render the data intelligently. We also endeavor to only use tables in page content where there is a real need for them, in the case of tabular data, for example.

Skip Navigation

A function is provided for users of adaptive devices to allow them to skip through the main navigation on each page if they do wish. Screen readers will read out each and every menu option exhaustively on each page, so this function allows a user to go directly to the page content if they wish.

Accessibility references

1. Dive into accessibility www.diveintoaccessibility.org
2. W3 accessibility guidelines, which explains the reasons behind each guideline.
3. W3 accessibility techniques, which explains how to implement each guideline.
4. W3 accessibility checklist, a busy developer's guide to accessibility.
5. U.S. Federal Government Section 508 accessibility guidelines.

Accessibility software

1. Firevox, a free screen reader plugin for the free Firefox browser for Windows (requires Microsoft SAPI 5+)
2. Opera, a visual browser with many accessibility-related features, including text zooming, user stylesheets, image toggle and high-contrast content display. A free downloadable version is available. Compatible with Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and several other operating systems.
3. JAWS, a commercial screen reader for Windows. A time-limited, downloadable demo is available.
4. Lynx, a free text-only web browser for blind users with refreshable Braille displays.
5. Links, a free text-only web browser for visual users with low bandwidth.