Help

Welcome to House of Migration Help. This page provides answers to questions we’re frequently asked, as well as outlining the features of the website, and its accessibility features.

Access keys—jumping around parts of the website quickly with your keyboard

Most browsers support jumping to specific links by typing keys defined on the web site. On Windows, you can press Alt + an access key; on Macintosh, you can press Control + an access key.

All pages on this site define the following access keys:

Acronyms & Abbreviations

If you are using a modern standards compliant browser, acronyms and abbreviations will be marked with a dashed underline, which looks different to underline of a link. To expand the full term, just place your pointer over the word, e.g.: WWW

Standards Compliance

  1. All pages on this site validate as XHTML 1.0 Strict. For example, check the home page for XHTML validity.
  2. All style sheets on this site validate as CSS1 and 2.
  3. All pages on this site use structured semantic markup. H2 tags are used for main titles, H3 tags for subtitles.

Navigation Aids

  1. All pages have rel=previous, next, up, and home links to aid navigation in text-only browsers. Netscape 6 and Mozilla users can also take advantage of this feature by selecting the View menu, Show/Hide, Site Navigation Bar, Show Only As Needed (or Show Always). Firefox users can install an extension to do this such as Link Toolbar
  2. The home page and all archive pages include a search box (access key 4).

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. Complex images include LONGDESC attributes or inline descriptions to explain the significance of each image to non-visual readers.

Form Labels

By labeling form elements, screen reading sofware will intelligently announce what a particular input element is, by reading the label. Also, users can click on the text labels which will activate the associated form element. This gives users with limited vision a much wider margin of error.

Printing

The site uses a printer style sheet which will only print the important content on each page without all the navigation. This maximizes the use of your printer while saving paper at the same time.

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. In Firefox, you can easily decrease/increase the text size by pressing Ctrl and the – key, or the + key, and the 0 key to reset it to the original size.
  3. If your browser or browsing device does not support stylesheets at all, the content of each page is still readable.

Accessibility References

Accessibility and Accessible Software

Accessibility services