Accessibility

In June 2013 we relaunched the SciDev.Net website to make it more usable and accessible to our global audience. The site is now easier to use with improved navigation within a simplified website architecture. Content is available in four languages (English, Arabic, French and Spanish) with archive content in Chinese preserved and available through external search and legacy links.

Web browsers

Our website is fully supported by the most popular Internet browsers (Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, Opera). For the optimum viewing experience the latest versions of these browsers should be used to view our website.

Changing font size

Web Browsers (Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome) enable you to change the font size of the text displayed, to increase the font size in most browsers you can press the CTRL and + keys together to increase the font size and the CTRL and - keys together to decrease font size. Pressing the CTRL and 0 keys together will enable your browser to be viewed at the original size. Alternatively, this function is located in the view menu on most browser’s toolbar, see below:

Internet_Explorer_view

As a large proportion of our audience are based in the developing world many of our users view the internet at a small screen resolution, typically 800 x 600 pixels or less. In light of this, the standard width of our web pages are set to 800 pixels to ensure those users visiting SciDev.Net have a good website experience.

Layout and navigation

The core central navigation menu is fixed and floats on every page to enable easy access to the main homepage, topic-specific sections of the site and key other site pages. A faceting menu on topic pages enables users to quickly and easily filter results to find content most relevant to their needs. Navigating through hyperlinks on pages can also be achieved through pressing tab. Links to topic pages are also present on article pages to aid navigation.

Low bandwidth tools

We make every effort to keep our webpages light and optimise page delivery to our global users. However, we recognise that in our recent redesign we have enriched site features signficiantly with items such as multimedia, larger images and functions to showcase key content. If you are experiencing issues in accessing our website fully due to low-internet bandwidth in your area we recommend that you access our mobile site, which offers a stripped-down, lightweight version of SciDev.Net. Alternatively you may wish to try a low-bandwidth simulator provided by Aptivate, an organisation specialising in international development IT. This free tool will simplify the viewing experience by reducing website page sizes (such as hiding images). To access SciDev.Net using the loband simulator please click here.

We welcome any feedback in the accessibility of our website to ensure user requirements are met. We hope our website is as accessible for as many people as possible but recognise there may be things that can be improved upon. Please email your comments to [email protected].