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Site help

The Transition Network website has been developed with the aim that it is usable and accessible for all visitors to the site. You can view a site map of all main pages here. There are various types of physical disabilities that impact user interaction on the web. Vision loss, hearing loss, limited manual dexterity, and cognitive disabilities are examples, with each having different means by which to access electronic information effectively. Our goal is to provide a good web experience for all visitors.

Below you will find a list of some of the technology solutions we have integrated to make this website easy to navigate, fast-loading and accessible. To further improve the ease of use and readability of this site, such as increasing the font size, please review the section below on how to customize your browser.

We have also included a list of links to frequently asked questions about adding content to the site

Quick Links about how to use and view the website

Adding and editing content on the site

 

What Makes Our Website Accessible?

  • Clean, Simple and Consistent
    Our website uses simple information architecture with uniform navigation and reliable headings throughout. Content layout and graphical design are consistent on every page.
  • The Navigation
    The main navigation, located just below the title banner (Transition logo area), uses lists. Lists make it easier for screen readers to literally read down the list without having to sort through unnecessary code. Lists also allow the users to use the tab key to move from link to link.
  • Images With Alternative Text
    Photographs and other relevant images on the site are accompanied by alternative text (the ALT tag.) Alt tags provide a written description of the image, which is accessible to screen readers, and it is visible when the mouse is placed over the image. This is also useful for people who have images turned off on their browser, in which case a description will display where the image used to be.
  • Relative Font Sizing
    Relative font size can be enlarged using magnification tools or by changing your browser settings.
  • Style Sheets
    Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are used for content layout and graphical elements (color, font styles, custom titles and subtitles, etc.) Using CSS for styling keeps our HTML clean, streamlined, easier to maintain, and it downloads faster. Style sheets can be replacedby the user’s own styles.To turn CSS off, and access the content without any formatting, download and install the Firefox Web Developer toolbar or the Internet Explorer Developer toolbar. With these toolbars turning CSS on and off is just a click away, plus they offer many other helpful tools. If you use a different browser, do an Internet search for accessibility for your particular browser.
  • Accessible Via Mouse or Keyboard
    You can use the mouse or keyboard to navigate through our information. The tab key will move the cursor from link to link.
  • No Sound, No Images, No Problem
    Content is accessible without sound, colour, scripts or graphics.

Customize Your Browser to Fit Your Needs

Change font size

In most browsers (example: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera) you could change the font size by following the steps below:

  • Open your browser
  • Click View button from top menu bar
  • Click Text Size (in Opera click ‘Zoom’)
  • Select your option

If your browser uses a different naming convention and you do not see this path, please check the Help menu on your browser. The Help menu is usually the last option on the top menu bar, and it can often be accessed by pressing the keys “Alt” + “H”.

In addition, newer browser versions have a magnifying tool that lets you zoom into a page and display all elements at 150 percent, 200 percent, etc. Look for the magnifying tool with a “+” character. This icon is typically located at the bottom of your browser, on the right, or at the top, below the standard menu tools, on the right. Furthermore, the keyboard shortcut to access this tool is: “Ctrl” + “Shift” + “+” to zoom in, and “Ctrl” + “Shift” + “-” to zoom out.

Shortcuts

  • Keyboard shortcuts: This is a list of the most common keyboard shortcuts in Firefox, and the equivalents in Internet Explorer and Opera (from Firefox website).
  • Mouse shortcuts: This is a list of the most common mouse shortcuts in Firefox, and the equivalents in Internet Explorer and Opera. The shortcuts are for Windows, but most of the Firefox shortcuts should work in Linux, too (from FireFox website).
  • Internet Explorer keyboard shortcuts.

Add-ons

Change CSS

  • Below is the step by step on how to change the style sheet file in Internet Explorer. For other browsers please check the Help menu in your browser.
    • Click Tools from the top menu bar
    • Select Internet Options
    • Select the General tab (first tab)
    • Click on Accessibility button (bottom section, Appearance)
    • Click on checkboxes to ignore all colors and font styles and sizes and/or
    • Click on checkbox: “Format documents using my style sheet”
    • Browse to your personal style sheet and
    • Click OK

Difficulty Accessing Material

If you have difficulty accessing any material on this site because of a disability or have questions or suggestions, please contact us we will work with you to make the information available.

Privacy

We are using a open source (GPL licensed) web analytics application called Piwik to monitor people's use of our site. This enables us to collect and analyse website usage metrics in order to refine the site in line with people's needs. We have stopped using Google Analytics and switched to Piwik as we take people's privacy seriously and don't want to share this data with third parties out of convenience. Now the information collected is only available to the people managing the site.

We track website usage on the Transition Network website and on our 'Project Sharing Widgets'. The Project Sharing Widgets are pages from our website, embedded into other websites in a iFrame by the webmasters of those sites. We assume that webmasters of those sites that embed the Project Sharing Widget accept our privacy policy.

Our installation of Piwik supports and respects Do-Not-Track settings you might have set in your browser, if you have specified in your browser that you do not want to be tracked then we will not track you. We also remove the last two parts of client IP adddresses, if your address is 123.456.789.012 then our Piwik application will lookup what country your IP address is allocated to and then drop the last two segments and only store 123.456.0.0.

If you have an account on the site then you have the option to opt out of the Piwik tracking on your user preferences page, see the "Piwik configuration", "Enable user tracking" tick box.

If you want to prevent this tracking as an anonymous user of the site you can either set your browser up to send Do-Not-Track headers, see the Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer instructions or install the Ghostery plugin, which available for Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer and which has an option to block Piwik.

Cookies

The Transition Network site uses cookies for 3 purposes:

  • Tracking, if you haven't opted out of Piwki tracking and / or you haven't set the "Do Not Track" option in your web browser and if you don't have a plugin that blocks javascript and / or web trackers then a pair of Piwik cookies will be set in your browser to identify all requests you make to the site.
  • Performance, one of the application we use to deploy the site, (Octopus) uses a cookie to manage how long objects are cached for.
  • Authentication, when you login to the site a cookie is set to say that you have been authenticated, this cookie is secure and is only transmitted via HTTPS. A further insecure cookie is set to identify that you have been authenticated and this is use to redirect you from the HTTP site to the HTTPS one, this is done to prevent the potential for confusion.

The only cookies that are essential for the functionality of the site are the authentication ones, if these are blocked then you will be unable to do things that authenticated user can do, for example posting comments in the forum.

Attentional cookies are set by third party sites on things like embedded images, videos and maps.