Accessibility Statement

One of our guiding principles is to make our information available to the widest possible audience, and that means making our web pages usable and accessible. The web is read not only with Internet Explorer on desktop computers over broadband connections, but also with Lynx, on televisions and handhelds, with braille- and speech-based devices, or without the use of a mouse.

Standards Compliance

Our first and most important step in "accessifying" L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology, Dianetics and Racism ("Scientology Racism") was to make our pages compliant with World Wide Web Consortium [offsite] standards. Writing standards-compliant pages —and insisting that browser makers support the standards— helps ensure access to web technologies for all manner of media, platforms, and users, i.e., the widest possible audience.

For this reason, we support the Web Standards Project [offsite] (WaSP), a grassroots coalition fighting for standards which ensure simple, affordable access to web technologies for all.

These technologies, which we call "web standards," are carefully designed to deliver the greatest benefits to the greatest number of web users while ensuring the long-term viability of any document published on the Web. … Designing and building with these standards simplifies and lowers the cost of production, while delivering sites that are accessible to more people and more types of Internet devices. Sites developed along these lines will continue to function correctly as traditional desktop browsers evolve, and as new Internet devices come to market.

-WaSP Mission Statement

Scientology Racism is built using valid XHTML 1.0 Strict for markup and CSS 2.1 for presentation. It displays as intended in modern browsers, is usable in most older browsers (and hopefully in alternative browsing devices), and is quite readable with style sheets disabled.

and

Our site complies with all Web Content Accessibility Guidelines [offsite] (WCAG) 1.0 Priority 1 requirements and nearly all of Priority 2. See how we're doing according to the WCAG's checklist.

Visual Design

Scientology Racism uses cascading style sheets for visual layout. If your browser or browsing device does not support CSS at all, the content of each page is still readable. We use only relative font sizes, compatible with the user-specified "text size" option in visual browsers. The layout is liquid, simply filling the viewport as the window is resized.

Accesskeys

Most browsers support jumping to specific links (e.g., Home, Contact, Site Map) by typing keys defined on the web site. This is potentially a very useful feature for many users. However, accesskeys often conflict with keyboard shortcuts defined by the browser or operating system. Because of this, we have chosen not to use accesskeys on Scientology Racism.

Navigation Aids

All pages have a consistent set of global navigation links. Our menu consists of links to the main sections of our site and each of the primary pages within those sections. "Page-turning" links point to the next page in the sequence and/or to the previously viewed page(s). General site links are provided to Home, Editors, SiteMap, Legal Disclaimer, and Host.

All section and primary pages have rel=previous, next, first and home links (in the <head> element) to aid navigation in text-only browsers and screen readers. Some modern graphical browsers (e.g., iCab, Opera, and Firefox with extension) also display this feature.

Links

All out-going links have TITLE attributes which describe the link destination. Whenever possible, link text is written to make sense out of context. There are no javascript pseudo-links and no links open new windows without a warning.

The first link on every page is "Skip Navigation", to skip the menu links and proceed directly to the contents of the page. This is primarily for the convenience of screen-readers and text-only browsers.

Images

All content images used on this site include a descriptive ALT attribute. Purely decorative graphics include a null ALT attribute. Complex images include LONGDESC attributes or links to a separate description to explain the significance of the image to non-visual readers.