Accesibility Conformance Level AAAAccesibility

The Human Communication and Interaction Research Group is making every effort to ensure that the information available on our website is accessible to all (this site has been designed in conformance with the W3C's WAI Accessibility Level AAA, the highest level possible).

However, if you use special adaptive equipment to access the web and encounter problems when surfing our site, please contact us and we will provide the information that you are looking for in an alternate format. It would be helpful if you can be as specific as possible when describing the problem found, including the Internet browser employed and its version in order to solve the problem as quick as possible.

This document describes the list of the main accesibility features of this site and how they should be used.

Quick Access Links

Visually hiden to PC-based Internet browsers, but still visible to text-based browsers, PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) and to mobile phone-based browsers, the site includes several Quick Access Links distributed in different zones across each document. They make navigation easier as it is possible to skip large blocks of information jumping from a block to the next one.

Those links may be accesed cycling thorough the list of available links in PC-based Internet browsers (usually by mean of the Tab key) or taping on them in text-based or in PDA-based browsers.

The sections where you will find those Quick Access Links are the following:

  1. At the beginning of each document you will find two links: the first one will let you skip the document's header jumping into the table of contents (navigation bar). The second link is used to jump to the contents of the page.
  2. After an initial description of the contents of each document, you will find the information structured in small sections. Just after the beggining of each section (header level 3) you will find a Quick Access Link to the next section available.
  3. At the end of each document you will find the same links found in its beginning: one of them will return you to the beginning of document's contents, as the other one will allow you to visit the navigation bar. This feature is specially useful in PDA and such kind of small devices, avoiding to use the tiny scroll bars to return to the beginning of each document.
  4. At the beginning of the navigation bar, a set of Quick Access Links allows you to jump to any of the different sections of our table of contents.

Access Keys

The links included in the navigation bar are powered by Access keys. They provide quick access to the main documents of the site. Just pressing the browser's accelerator key in combination with the Access key will allow you to jump to the target link without using the mouse or any other kind of pointing device.

The accelerator key used for quick access depends on the Internet browser used. For instance, the accelerator key for Mozilla's Firefox is the Alt+Shift key. Pressing the Alt+Shift key and the h key at the same time would order Firefox to download the home page for this site (as the h key is the Access Key for our home page).

The letter representing the Access Key for each link is overlined and displayed using a different high contrast colour.

Access Keys for this site.
Access Key Document Description
t Top of the Document. Access to the top of the document.
c Contents Section. Access to the contents section in each page.
h Home. Latest news and highlights of our research group.
s Sitemap. Summary of the contents for each page of this site.
o Contact us. Our mail and e-mail address, as well as our phone and fax numbers.
y Accessibility. Instructions about how to use the accessibility features of this site.
u Join us. Terms and conditions to join our group.
n Partners. List of companies and academic institutions we collaborate with.
b Members. Biographic summary of every member of this research group.
w Awards. Awards received by our research group.
j Projects. List of our current and finished projects.
l Publications. List of our publications since 1999.
f Conferences. Conferences on Human-Computer Interaction organized by our group..

Mobile devices and PDA Support

Each document of this site gracefully renders on the small screens of Personal Digital Assistants (PDA) and such kind of portable devices. Although the representation of the information might be slighty different from PC-based Internet browsers (due to the space constraints of those tiny devices) the information displayed is exactly the same.

Our web page displayed in Pocket PC device.

Multimodal Representation

Documents on this site are presented in many formats. These formats are generally accessible to users using screen reading software. Some files on this web site may be posted as Adobe Acrobat PDF (Portable Document Format) files. Adobe provides their Acrobat Reader software as a free download.