The Central Access Limited website has been built to conform to W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) guidelines for accessibility. The features of this website are listed below.

Change Font Size

Using current web technologies for Cascading Stylesheets (CSS), you now have the ability to switch styles while surfing the Central Access Limited website. This does not alter the toolbar, only the body of the page.

You can use the "Control Panel" toolbar to the right to increase and decrease the general body font size. Also, if you are running a standards-compliant browser, you can also switch your styles using the browser interface - generally FONTS or STYLES under the VIEW menu. Modern standards-compliant browsers allow you to easily increase the font sizing from the view menu, the keyboard or even the mouse by simply selecting the command to increase or decrease font size. The Opera browser, an excellent accessibilty browser, actually scales the entire webpage - fonts, images and all.

Printing Options

Clean printing

Using our Print feature from the "Control Panel" toolbar allows users to print pages specifically designed for hardcopy and legibility. A new window will be opened with the current page content contained within. The navigation menus and other design elements will be removed, the text will wrap to the page margins, and the font face is updated ready for printing. This will be supported in all browsers that accept stylesheets.

Print the screen version

If you wish to print the web page exactly as it appears on the screen, do not select the print option in the toolbar, but rather select Print directly from the browser's File menu. It may be necessary to turn on background images if you want to exactly replicate the on-screen layout. Remember web graphics are generally poorly suited to printing.

Browser Recommendations

While Central Access Limited does its best to support users with older browsers, the reality is that some of our online/electronic resoures require the use of modern standards-compliant browsers which have both JavaScript and cookies enabled. Running modern standards-compliant browsers allows the user to access resources, materials and the World Wide Web as it was originally intended.

There are now several excellent browsers to choose from apart from Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator and many of these alternate browsers are designed to run on older class Pentiums or Macs. For more information on standards compliant browsers visit The Web Standards Project or the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

For users with visual impairments, accessibility issues or even users who wear glasses for reading, we highly recommend the use of the Opera web browser. It has some excellent accessibility features, the most notable of which is the ability to easily scale both the text and graphics for entire web pages. It does carry small banner ads in its toolbar, the removal of which requires a $30 registration. A free alternative is the MYIE2 web browser, which also features the same full-page scaling options, as well as tabbed browsing, eliminating the need to have many browser windows open while web surfing. However MYIE2 requires Internet Explorer to also be installed. We also recommend and support the use of Internet Explorer, to which all of our web pages conform.

Free downloads of the following browsers are available at these URLs:

• for Windows
  • Opera (An excellent alternative, with great accessibility features including full page scaling. Works with all online resources. Fast.)
  • MYIE2 (A free alternative to Internet explorer, expanding on many of IE features, including pop-up stopper and tabbed browsing.)
  • Mozilla Firefox (A very rich browser. Fully standards compliant.)
  • Internet Explorer (Very solid browser. Works with all online resources. Considered standard. Limited CSS.)
  • Phoenix (Not for the faint of heart. Fast and very compact footprint.)
  
  
• for Macintosh
  • Mozilla Firefox (A very rich browser. Fully standards compliant.)
  • Opera (An excellent alternative, with great accessibility features including full page scaling. Works with all online resources. Fast.)
  • Safari (A very solid browser and fast. Appears to be the new standard Macintosh browser replacing IE but only for Macintosh OS X.)
  • Internet Explorer (A fairly solid browser. Works with all online resources. HOWEVER, Microsoft is no longer supporting or developing it.)
  • Camino (Mozilla flavour for the Macintosh. Still very beta.)

This is by no means an exhaustive list. There are lots of other browsers out there, but some may take massaging to get them to work with our many websites, so they are not recommended for those with limited computer skills or patience.