Accessibility

This website incorporates a number of features for visitors with disabilities.

Images have an alternative textual description which will pop-up when the the mouse pointer hovers over them and will be spoken by screen reader.

Where appropriate some hyperlinks have an additional, informative title which will be revealed when the mouse pointer hovers over them and will be spoken by screen reader.

Using the keyboard to navigate

The 'Tab' key can be used to move from hyperlink to hyperlink causing each link in turn to be enclosed within a faint border. When a link is activated in this way pressing either the 'Enter' or 'Return' key will open the page to which the link refers.

In order to avoid having to tab through the main navigation panel at the top each time you view a page, press 'Alt' and 's' at the same time followed by 'Enter' to jump to the side navigation panel on the left of the page, then use the tab key to select the link you require. Or press 'Alt' and 'm' followed by 'Enter' to jump to the main text on the page. Note: a few pages do not have an additional side navigation panel, therefore only the Alt + m option is available to avoid confusion.

When following a hyperlink from a thumbnail image in the Virtual Galleries, on each page which opens there is a 'Back' button for returning to the thumbnail gallery (or previous) page. Holding down the 'Alt' key and pressing the 'Left Arrow' key will also move back through the pages one at a time.

Access keys

The top menu bar is accessible using the following keys:

Press the 'Alt' key and one of the following, followed by 'Enter' -

1 - Home

2 - Smugglers

3 - Shipwrecks

4 - Dorset Museums

5 - For Teachers

6 - Virtual Galleries

7 - Archive

s - Jump to side navigation panel

m - Jump to main text

How to increase the text size in Internet Explorer 5.0, 5.5 and 6.0

• Choose the drop-down menu at the top of the window marked 'View'
• A list of options will appear - choose 'Text Size'
• Another drop-down menu will appear - choose 'Larger' or 'Largest'

Pop-up windows

On a few pages there are links to pop-up windows. Your browser (or other software) will need to have pop-up windows enabled in order to browse them. In particular many pages in the Shipwreck section have thumbnail images of objects recovered from wrecks. These link to pop-up windows which load larger images and more information.

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