Help with this website

This website has been designed with the blind and partially sighted in mind, however problems will inevitably occur when navigating your way around.

Please select a hyperlink below to choose a help topic most appropriate to your particular problem.

• Navigating the site
• Software requirements
  • Cascading Stylesheets
• Viewing the site for the partially sighted
• Sitemap
• Comments and suggestions

Website navigation

This website has been laid out in a logical manner. The homepage has links to all the major subsections, with each of these leading to a submenu from which you can navigate further into the site.

Keypressing to navigate

Each link on these main and sub-menus uses the HTML (Hyper Text Mark-up Language) tag attribute of "accesskey". This means that browsing using a conventional web-browser is aided by the ability to push a key combination on your computer's keyboard to select and follow a hyperlink.

The convention on this website (Microsoft windows operating system) is to simply push "Alt+A" followed by "enter" to follow the first link on a page, "Alt+B"and "enter" for the second and so on for all the links on a page. For Macintosh try pressing "Cmd+A", "Cmd+B" etc.

Each page has a footer, which contains links to the main site sections as well as site specific pages - again such as contact and search. The key-press convention for following these links is: "Alt+1", "Alt+2" through to "Alt+5". Pressing "ALT+6" followed by enter, will always take you back to the Retina New Zealand homepage.

Each page also has a 'back button' which takes you backwards in your navigation of the site by one page. The convention for each page is to select the link text on the footer entitled "Return to previous page" or to press "ALT+0" followed by enter.

If the letter or number key combination you press, exceeds the number of links on a page using that letter, or numeric key, then this will return use of the "ALT" key to revealing toolbar menus as it normally would do.

'Mailto' Hyperlinks

All links to email addresses are linked in such a way as to open up your default email programme if you have one. (Internet Explorer users will usually have Outlook Express email, bundled when they originally purchased or downloaded the software).

They also have alternative text attached to them, that explains this on the page.

Note:

The keystroke shortcuts will not work for the email mailto links.

Software requirements

Browsing the site is made easier by the use of facilities like key pushing as well as mouse clicking, and also hyperlink text highlighting using the black and white background flashes.

However, those wishing to browse the site utilising these conventions and using a conventional web browser would be well-advised to download the latest Microsoft Internet Explorer browser, version 5.5, as it supports all the latest innovations in the HTML4.0 specification for website accessibility authoring, of which several elements have been incorporated in this site.

Please follow this link to the download page of the Microsoft website. There you will be able to follow instructions on how to download the software. It is around 15 Megabytes and will take upwards of 10 minutes to download.

Cascading Stylesheets

Some of the features mentioned include Cascading Stylesheets which need to be enabled on your browser to ensure maximum usability of this site.

Please follow these instructions to enable/activate Cascading Stylesheets on your Microsoft Internet Explorer web-browser:

• On the toolbar at the top of the browser select 'Tools', and at the bottom of the menu that appears click 'Internet options'.
• On the box that appears, select the button marked 'Accessibility' at the bottom.
• On the list that appears, ensure that all checkboxes are NOT checked. If they are then the browser will override any style settings defined in the webpage.
• Click 'OK' and then 'OK' again to return to the page being viewed

Sitemap

This site uses the links at the very top of the homepage as links to the major parts of the site. Sub pages of the site can then be accessed from further sub-menus that are reached as a result.

Optimal browser settings for the partially sighted

Please follow these hints for optimising your conventional web-browser to view this and other websites:

Font settings: Size and type

Below are some guidelines on overriding the site's font styles to suit your own visibility needs.
Please note however that the styles employed in the website have been designed with the visually impaired in mind. So if these are overridden then, some aspects of specific site design will be lost while these browser settings are in operation.

For Microsoft Internet Explorer versions 4 and above:

Select "Tools" followed by "internet options" and then the buttons at the bottom of this menu entitled "Fonts", "Colours", and "Accessibility". The latter you can tick boxes to ignore fonts and styles specified on web-pages in favour of overriding them by your own settings. You can do this by clicking on the "Fonts" button to alter font types.

To select font size, select "view" on the toolbar followed by "Text size" You can then specify font sizes to suit your viewing needs.

For Netscape version 4 and above:

On the toolbar menu, select "Edit" followed by "Preferences", then select "Appearance" on the left hand menu. A new sub-menu will show itself, you can then select the appropriate text, like "Fonts" and "Colours".

To alter font size, select "View" from the toolbar, followed by increase or decrease font size. Click these repeatedly to increase or decrease the font size up or down a level. The keyboard shortcuts for these are "Ctrl+]" for increasing and; "Ctrl+[" to decrease.

Comments and suggestions

Please send an email message by selecting this text. This will bring up your default email programme (if you have one installed) and explain in the message how you believe the site could be made more navigable and easier to use by the visually impaired and other disabled users.