The Marine Institute is committed to providing information and services that are fully accessible to people with disabilities.
Access keys
The following access keys are used on the website:
- Accessibility statement (0)
- Skip to content (S)
- Home Page (1)
- Site Map (3)
- Search (4)
Page layout and navigation
Most pages on the website are structured as follows:
- Global Links – Jump to content, Sitemap
- Main navigation – links to the main sections of the web site (Home, About Us, Services, Funding, Publications and Data, Marine Community)
- 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 – key word searching of the web site (access key 4).
- Section navigation – when you select a category in the main navigation, a list of further navigation links is available here for content within that section. On the home page, this area is used to link to pages covering materials on specific topics such as Aquaculture.
- Content – main content for that page, structured using headings and paragraph elements.
- Quick Links – A list of important links relating to the content area, such as latest news items, important downloads and related materials elsewhere on the web site.
- My Links – A feature that enables you to bookmark three of your favourite pages on the website and access them from here as links.
- Additional links – Contacts, Legal, Accessibility Statement, Disclaimer, Privacy Policy, FOI (Freedom of Information)
Standards compliance
The Marine Institute 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 website uses structured semantic markup. H1 tags are used for main titles, H2 and H3 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, the Institute has published internal guidelines to guide web administrators and authors in the creation of accessible web content.
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