Accessibility

La Caze Gites, and Sleepless Creations who designed and developed this website, recognise the importance of providing a website that is accessible for all users. As such we have made every effort to ensure that our site can be easily used by people with disabilities.

Whilst every effort has been made to ensure this is the case with the site under going vigorous testing at every stage to ensure maximum accessibility, there maybe times when an accessibility failure occurs that we are unaware of. If you're subject to such a failure, then please contact us via our contact page.

Site Specific Functionailty

We have done our best to build in as many accessibility enhancing features as possible into the website. These features are outlined below:

Menu Navigation

The site's main menu navigation uses text links rather than images to ensure that they are screen reader accessible. However to further enhance the menu system, each menu item is linked to a numeric accesskey from 1 to 8. The accesskeys and their corresponding pages are outlined in the list below.

Home
Accommodation
Local Area
Reaching La Caze
Booking & Tariff
Contact
Links

External Links

All links which take you to a website outside of this one will open in a new browser window. We firmly believe that it is more frustrating for both the end user and the site owner to have external links that take you completely away from the site you were browsing previously and that by ensuring that all of our external links open in a new window there is no confusion as to whether you are leaving the site or not. Once the new window has opened, you are of course welcome to close the one containing this site, or if you would like to avoid windows opening at all costs, then you can or course do the following:

Right click the mouse button on the external link
Select "Copy Shortcut" or "Copy Link Location"
Select the address bar of your browser window
Press CTRL and the V key the same time
The site will be placed into the address bar to be accessed

Design And Development

In addition to specific, built-in functionality, the site also utilises modern technologies in order to enhance its accessibility.

CSS Code

The site layout is styled using valid, hack-less, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS2) in order to separate the presentation layer and the programming layer of the site. This should greatly cut down on the amount of information a screen reader will have to process in order to provide you with the content of the site.

Strict XHTML Code

To complement the presentation layer of the site, the programming layer is written to adhere to strict XHTML 1.0 standards. This will once again cut down the amount of information a screen reader will have to process in order to provide you with the content of the site.

Visual Text Size Enhancers

At the bottom of every page you will find links with the following descriptions, A+, A++, and A+++. These links will increase and decrease the size of the site's text within a certain range when clicked on. The A+ link will also revert the site back to it's original text size, whilst the A++ link will increase the text size by around 25‰ and the A+++ will increase the text size by around 50‰.

Browser Behaviour - Making your web browser more accessible

The two most popular browsers are Internet Explorer and Firefox, although there now are other well used browsers such as Apple Safari and Opera. Below you will find a step-by-step guide to enlarging the text within Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Opera. If you have also changed the settings in your operating system and find that this does not magnify the text enough to be useful, then it maybe worth investigating screen magnification software, further assistance on this is provided at the bottom of the page.

These instructions are for use with the browser versions listed below, however they may also work with other versions of the same web browser.

Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0, 5.5 and 6.0

Open your Internet Explorer web browser.
Choose the drop down menu at the top of the window of the browser marked view.
A list of options will appear in the drop down menu, choose text size.
Next another drop down menu should appear with options including small, medium, large, largest.
Select Largest.

The text in your browser window should now appear larger. If this is still too small for you then it may be that you need to look at other ways of enlarging the text on your screen, such as screen magnification software.

Mozilla Firefox 1.5

Open your Firefox browser.
Hold down the Ctrl button on your keyboard and press the plus (+) key.
You will find that this will enlarge the text, to enlarge again repeat the procedure.
Keep repeating until the text is enlarged to your requirements.
If you need to make the text smaller press ctrl on your keyboard and the minus ( - ) key .

Apple Safari 1.2 and 2.0

Open your Apple Safari browser.
Hold down the Apple Key and press the (+) key.
You will find that this will enlarge the text, to enlarge again repeat the procedure.
Keep repeating until the text is enlarged to your requirements.
If you need to make the text smaller press the Apple Key on your keyboard and press the (-) key.

Further Assistance

If you have a vision impairment then we recommend that you visit the RNIB website (which will open in a new browser window) as they provide specialist advice such as alternative screen readers, screen magnifiers and other devices that are available and can make using a computer easier and more enjoyable.

We also thoroughly recommend that you visit the website of AbilityNet (which will open in a new browser window), as they are the UK's leading consultancy in the field of computing and disability. In addition to their excellent My Computer My Way web site which provides a wealth of advice on making your computer accessible, AbilityNet also provide a free service to individuals with disabilities to assess their computing needs (call them free on 0800 269 545 for more information).