Privacy Act 1988
Heretic Press may make a record of your visit to our webpages and display logs of any of the following information for statistical and business purposes; the user's server address, the user's domain name, IP address, the date and time of the visit, the pages accessed and documents downloaded, the previous site visited and the type of browser used.
No personal information such as home addresses or phone numbers will be disclosed and no record of personal email addresses are displayed, except those of public servants and contracted service providers for the Commonwealth or State government. Information in the public domain already available on public servants and contractors websites may be displayed in the public interest and details of legal actions paid for by the Commonwealth or State government. The business address, and email addresses of Commonwealth public servants politicians and government contractors may be displayed where relevant to any social issues.
Heretic Press uses a relative directory structure, it is quicker to load a partial URL like index.html than the full file pathway to that file which includes the domain name eg. http://www.yourdomain/index.html.
Relative directories also make the site easier to move to a new domain name and with a few minor modifications, the entire site will run off a CD. If a browser or screen reader gets to any page, the meta tags provide a link to all child and parent pages in that directory, as well as links to important pages like search, home and the accessibility statement. Getting to any page in a relative directory which uses title tags in the header allows easy access to that entire site not just the page found.
In your browser menu items, Select View Source or View Page Source to see the meta tags, even providing a title element for related pages which some screen readers can read.
<base href="http://www.hereticpress.com/Dogstar/Access/index.html" /"> is needed as all the URLs in the page are partial pathways. <base href> is needed where documents are structured in directories relative to each other. One advantage of this is that it is easier to create a mirror copy of the site. This also has a security downside, in that your files can be easier to reproduce in the same directory structure on another site. The Heretic Press relative directory structure is mirrored by the National Library of Australia Pandora archive in the same relative directory structure.
My apologies to anyone viewing this site on a slow internet connection. This site is heavily laden with different graphics and large gif files for each of seven different stylesheets. I do assume that you are either patient or have a fast internet connection.
The header graphics for hereticpresspress.com are animated gif images, they are not part of the html of the page. They have no alt. If you have images turned off or CSS disabled you will not see some animation of the letters hereticpress rotating in different directions backflip, front flip, left and right rotations to arrive at the starting point in 120 frames a looping animation of the word hereticpress. On the left and right side of the hereticpress masthead is a 120 frame thumbnail animation of the earth with the Photoshop filter glowing edges applied to each frame on the continental glowing outline against black seas applied to each frame. Even with images or CSS turned off, the Stylesheet images may take up to 120 pixels on the top of your browser page space. Images are decorative masthead animations and are not usually related to any specific page content apart from a page of looping earth Animations.
Guidelines
UN Report New draft Web accessibility guidelines, WCAG 2 state that a site can specify what level of technology is supported for accessibility. To hell with WCAG 2. We agree with Joe Clark and believe WCAG 2 violates the principles of providing access for everyone. We try to assume as little as possible and will comply with WAG 1 as well as WAG 2, where possible.
Browsers
Webstandards This website complies with W3C standards for validated XHTML 1.0 Strict and Cascading Stylesheets CSS2. We recommend browsers which render stylesheet formatting. Unfortunately the major browser with about 60% of the market, internet Explorer 6 and 7 are not standards compliant. Acid2 test. Unless the webpage author makes special consideration for Explorer, they will miss some graphics or layout features of the page. If you are using Internet Explorer, you will get the same text content, but might be missing some graphics (eg. The horizontal lines hr) in these pages are all pictures, they are not usually displayed by Explorer unless a special allowance is made as has been done here for Explorer. xhtml 2.0 introduces a new xhtml tag for the purpose of separating content separator which will replace the horizontal rule hr tag.
Standards compliant browsers can make it easier to display pages the way the author and HTML stylesheet editor intend.
A newer more standards compliant browser, Mozilla is an open source browser more standards compliant than Explorer. Mozilla browser releases.
Screen size
Some parts of this site are full screen animations and pictures, mainly American NTSC standard 640 × 480 pixels large. A few movies are the larger 1024 × 768 pixels PAL Standard. These images are best viewed on a 13 inch monitor or larger. The top page header graphic will collapse, but most of the text will flow into a window phone display of 150 pixels, many images will require scrolling the window. Select a small font style for small displays.
Site Structure and Navigation
This site uses relative directory structures in the header information to reveal links to parents siblings and children of the current page.
There is a link on every page to important pages like this accessibility statement and other pages like
Search the
Home page, the
SiteMap and a
more helpful Error 404 page.
Content
Where we use foreign language phrases or higher level language terms, we will try and include information in a rollover or glossary of foreign language phrases to translate any difficult content into simple language.
Please tell us how to improve access. Contact the Webmaster. We aim to make all pages accessible to anyone and try to provide keyboard access and do not assume you are using a mouse.
All pages rated AAA are tested and validated as passing AAA rating with the Cynthia online validator.
The Bobby website (now called WEBXACT) accessibility analysis, does not automatically validate pages, or test that alternatives are provided. Bobby lists concerns and points out what page elements should be addressed in another way. For example, one Bobby comment on Heretic pages is that the foreground and background colours should be high contrast.
We have seven stylesheet options for users to select their own high contrast colour scheme. We believe that we address the concerns and we will aim for even higher standards.
What is more even important to us than online validation, is your feedback.
The keyboard shortcuts are browser and system dependant. For example, using a Windows operating system and keyboard, shortcuts here might not work with Explorer, which might use the windows operating system shortcuts. You might need to change your browser to use these shortcuts.
Shortcuts will be implemented on all pages which bear the accessibility conformance logos at the bottom of this page. Short cuts do not need to be remembered as they appear above the active item on a "onMouseOver" rollovers or the "onfocus" event.
All Hereticpress.com webpages are validated XHTML 1.0 Strict. Pages validated as AAA accessible, bear the W3C AAA logo at the page footer. Some pages which are intense in movies and graphics, might never fully comply with AAA accessibility requirements!
Every Heretic page bearing the AAA conformance logos has a Tab Index in the page. You can navigate through long pages using the "Tab" key on your keyboard.
Ctrl+1 Go to the top of the page Ctrl+0 Go to start.
8 percent of males and 0.5 percent of females have some form of color blindness. Amaurosis (Gk, darkening dimming of vision)
Each of the three main types of colour blindness are related to a genetic differences in the production of visual pigment for the red, green and blue spectrums.
Green blindness is associated with a lack of chloralabe and red blindness is associated with deficient erythrolabe.Blue blindness is a much rarer condition of the X chromosone where cyanolabe is deficient.
Complete colour blindness is the inability to see any colour, where there are retinal rods sensitive to black white and greys, but NO colour sensitive Cones for; red, green and blue which are usually at the back of the eye. Without colour vision cones, black and white is easier to read and low light night vision can be better than bright daylight coloured sight.
Tetartanopia and tritanopia (Gk, A person unable to discern blue colours)
Blue and violet blindness is imperfect perception of the short wavelengths visual spectrum. Yellow blindness imperfect perception of yellow tints. Blue-Yellow blindness imperfect perception of blue and yellow tints.
Deuteranopia and prolanopia(Gk, A person unable to discern green colours)
Red blindness imperfect perception of the red spectrum. Green blindness imperfect perception of green tints.
Eclipse blindness loss of central vision caused by a burn on the macula by sunlight.
Flight blindness high centrifugal forces in flight can produce amaurosis fugax
Letter blindness inability to recognise individual letters
Concussion blindness due to violent explosion
Legal Blindness is determined buy the maximum visual acuity of the best eye. 20% of the total diameter of the visual field.
An online test for colour blindness. What do various colours look like for each of the major forms of colour blindness? Provide text font colour and size options.
Considering the colour blind. In Australia, websites have been sued for being inaccessible.
The Contrast Colour 2.0 Analyser from Steve Faulkner.
Heretic stylesheets are currently based on publishing options, serif or san-serif fonts. We are revising three of the stylesheet options for users to exclude certain colours which they may have difficulty seeing.
See which stylesheet suits you best, User Preferences
The first two stylesheets are high contrast; blue, on a black background, the second in mainly green and gold on the black background. A third excludes green. Other font options for low vision users are larger text options on pastel coloured and white backgrounds, serif or sans-serif font choices to help the user's reading strengths. The printing stylesheet No 7 makes some page navigation elements like "return to top" of page and "skip navigation" invisible for printing purposes.
Another example of using aural CSS stylesheets which is currently un-supported by screen readers! Patrick Hanrahan's novel NUNC Set the stylesheet to Number two The author's choice.
Stylesheet 2 uses the before: property to insert the characters names before their lines in a white #FFFFFF font on the black background.
Patrick's multilingual novels should be able to be read by multi-lingual voice technology, language HTML font tags are included for each character's lines, Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, Greek, German or Russian.
Each character in the novel has their own font and colour. They could also have their own voice accents.
.LeadMale:before
Stylesheets can do more than just format layout fonts and text, they can add extra interactivity and information before or after or they can even insert content in any HTML page element.
Some browsers do not fully support stylesheets. In Internet Explorer, the Horizontal rules appear as solid coloured lines, without their background picture.
Stylesheets can not only control fonts and formatting, they can add text or numbers that do not exist in the HTML.
At the bottom of this page the text "Stylesheets Updated 8th June 2006..." does not exist in this page, it is inserted at the page end, by the stylesheet property BODY:after{content:"Updated 8th June 2006...";
Some Heretic Press lists have a number inserted before each list item by the stylesheet property before. You can also set lists or paragraphs to number themselves automatically with list counters of all numerical types including, Arabic and Roman.
1. It is unlawful for a person who, whether for payment or not, provides goods or services, or makes facilities available, to discriminate against another person on the ground of the other person's disability or a disability of any of that other person's associates:
i. by refusing to provide the other person with those goods or services or to make those facilities available to the other person; or ii. in the terms or conditions on which the first-mentioned person provides the other person with those goods or services or makes those facilities available to the other person; or iii. in the manner in which the first-mentioned person provides the other person with those goods or services or makes those facilities available to the other person.
2. This section does not render it unlawful to discriminate against a person on the ground of the person's disability if the provision of the goods or services, or making facilities available, would impose unjustifiable hardship on the person who provides the goods or services or makes the facilities available.
Validity and accessibility tests on University and government websites in Australia, the UK and USA : University validity and accessibility tests in Australia: Experimental Design : Australian government sites : UK government sites : USA government sites : Guide to writing HTML
Heretic web test Results. Australian courts have not taken the American legal position. USA court rulings on Section 508, that the internet is not a place. The US Blind Federation court action against Target. The Australian legislation applies to any "goods or services" including those on the internet, all government agencies and private companies.
In the Heretic Press survey of Australian government web sites, 13 of 22 Australian government sites passed the American S.508 Standard, but only two passed AAA accessibility validation testing.
Australian Law
Heretic Press uses six stylesheets and a seventh for the author's choice, a publishing option as used for Patrick Hanrahan's novels like NUNCCtrl+N. Patrick's second high contrast black stylesheet also adds the pseudo property :before content:"Name" of each character, before they speak a line of dialogue, like a filmscript generated from the stylesheet.
More than two other options may be necessary for different fonts and colour combinations as well as the all black high contrast stylesheet. Please tell us what you think, how we can improve, please leave an entry in the guestbook (Ctrl+G) or email the The Editor at Heretic Press.
In making aural stylesheets consider how things will be read out by a computer, Abbreviations, telephone numbers etc.
We are patiently waiting for developments in screen reading software to use the aural stylesheets properties.
Windows Screen Readers
Window-Eyes
A screen reader which accesses the DOM. JAWS Blind programming mailing list including Jaws Email list. Scripts for JAWS
Jaws can be scripted with a language similar to Visual Basic to interact with other Windows™ software. An introduction to scripting from the American Foundation for the Blind.
Jaws also enables braille displays. Support for braille displays by different browsers.
Same-page links don't work correctly with JAWS about 25% of the time.
Browsealoud A free download for clients to control voices, word pronunciations and speech highlighting for Windows narrator Part of the Microsoft Windows XP operating system.
I could not get Browsealoud to change voices. It has a continuous reading option but it stops at links. There is also a subscription cost to the webmaster to offer this service.
For $79.95 US it can also make audio files. Please Read provides 20 different character voice options. For Internet Explorer. Not reviewed.
Macintosh Screen Readers
For the Macintosh operating systems Mac OSX v10.4 Tiger, there is VoiceOver VoiceOver will speak descriptions of items under the mouse, but is also designed to work using only the keyboard.
Voice Over has 20 unique voices that you can assign to different types of information. Voice Over works reasonable well with the Safari browser, but unfortunately Voice Over just stops reading at links and classes. It should continue reading! It would not read the XHTML "title" values of any objects which would provide more information on link elements. It also ignores table summaries and headers.
It does not recognise the aural style sheets properties for voice control.
Unlike JAWS for Windows which can use VBScript to access the Operating System and other applications, Voice Over seems unable to access external documents. Applescript might be able to be used to get Voice Over to access external Mac OS files? Documentation is sparse.
Reviews
Linux Screen Readers
Linux is a free open source operating system that many developers like to use because they can access all the code and add their own, but it is a more difficult operating system for a single user to configure and maintain than Windows™ or Mac™.
Essentially all you need is hardware and some operating system know-how to get a completely free system that allows much more than the current generation of screen readers. It supports aural stylesheets, allows changes in voice characteristic and inflections and includes auditory icons.
Emacspeak Available free of cost, is software for the Linux operating system that seems more advanced than windows or Mac screen readers.
Javascript voice technology Fire Vox for Firefox browser. it includes voice keyboard shortcuts Fire Vox for the Firefox browser.
Fire Vox is an open source, freely available talking browser extension for the Firefox web browser. It also supports different operating systems. Downloads. Tutorial
You could hire some voice actors and record your websites contents as sound files which can be podcasted. An easier alternative is to convert webpages to Audio files.
For USD $895, we can provide you with an accessibility report on your homepage and two other linking pages. The report will include results from automated testing tools as well a written analysis by the Heretic Press editor, Tim Anderson. Tim's report will identify and suggest code to improve your website accessibility to comply with the highest international standards of validated XHTML 1.0 Strict and AAA web accessibility.
Reports are completed within 48 hours of payment being received.
After you make the payment you can specify the pages to be examined. You pages will be examined according to international W3C standards of accessibility. Please contact the Webmaster if you have any special compliance obligation under European, UK, USA or Australian accessibility laws.
The heretic press looping earth animation sample frames
This Heretic Press Masthead™ is height="254" width="340" This is only a preview of one of the full files which due to creative rights and 50% royalty agreements, a small fee is charged to access the full looping animations which is 480 frames long. The first 60 frames are shown here. This image file is usually a linked by the tag longdesc to this long description of the Heretic Press spinning earth Masthead and looping earth animation logo.
In this instance, on this page it links to the Full animations.
All animations are in the .gif (8 Bit) file format which supports less than 256 colours. The .gif files are not as photorealistic as .jpg files which cannot be shown so easily in many browsers as older .gif file formats.
On a mouse rollover or keyboard onfocus the .gif files changes to a transparent version of the same animation. Here they all start at the beginning but with a transparent background. They could be synchronised to change at the same frame.
The Heretic Logo is a crown supported by a large A. The design is basically an upright frame, a capital A with a crown on top, capped by a bio-morph stick drawing of a human. The image was made into a 3-D model and rotated to a formula to complete 360° to an exact number of frames. Lighting effects and skin textures were applied to the model and it was rendered.
Graphically it is not very special, but made into a Shockwave movie, it demonstrates tracking and responding to a cursor position in a web page scripted with Director's language lingo.
The shockwave movie responds in direction of spin and movie played to user mouse actions. In this case the image is a transparent gif so it will show up on the different stylesheet backgrounds.
The use of W3C logos is determined by performance. You do not need permission to use the W3C logos below, but check with the copyright owner, the W3C about any others, W3C Copyright You must use the W3C validator to check if your pages are well formed and entitled to use the W3C html and xhtml logos. To use other W3C accessibility compliance logos, AAA and AAA pages must pass many Checkpoints specified by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
W3C is an abbreviation for the World Wide Web Consortium. They define internet document standards, versions of the webpage markup languages like HTML and XTML. If you write pages that conform to W3C standards, your webpages should display correctly in most browsers and search engines will be able to index all your page content. Good content; well structured documents, error free and accessible HTML can also have economic benefits SEO, so that searches of the web, for certain keywords will find your pages among the first search results.
w3c valid xhtml This is the small 31 by 88 pixel icon for the world Wide Web standards for writing HTML. On this site in almost all cases, it means Validated to XHTML 1.0 Strict. This strict document types must use all lower case xhtml tags and not use any deprecated older style html. Clicking on the validated xhtml 1.0 image automatically checks the verification of the page for accuracy as XHTML 1.0 with the W3C validation service.
W3C valid HTMLThis is the small 31 by 88 pixel icon for the world Wide Web standards for writing HTML 4.01. Other older version predating 4.01 include 4.0 and 3.2 Documents can be Strict or Transitional versions of html 4.01. Transitional documents allow older code to be included such as colour and font tags and allow new windows to be opened. HTML tags are case-insensitive, documents can be written in uppercase or lower case letters. On hereticpress.com, the few html 4.01 pages not updated to xhtml 1.0 are of a Strict document W3C specification.
Valid Stylesheet Logo This is another small 31 by 88 pixel icon for the world Wide Web standards for writing cascading stylesheets CSS. Stylesheets handle font and layout information for a page, CSS can be included in the document with <style> tags, on hereticpress.com version CSS2 of Cascading Style Sheet rules are used. All CSS on hereticpress.com is specified in seven different external stylesheets linked to in the header information for every page. Clicking on the CSS image takes you to the CSS validator to validate the CSS syntax of the CSS stylesheet or the validator will identify CSS errors.
Priority One Single A Cynthia Tested for Priority one level A level conformance with accessibility guidelines of the WCAG. A Small 31 by 88 pixel icon from the W3C this page is tested and passed accessibility Priority One level A compliance. Wherever possible we have tried to assume that a user might not be using a mouse and comply with all Checkpoints required to display this logo.
Priority Two Double AA Cynthia Tested for Priority Two AA level conformance with accessibility guidelines of the WCAG Small 31 by 88 pixel icon from the W3C this page is tested and passed accessibility Priority Two level AA compliance Wherever possible we have tried to assume that a user might not be using a mouse and comply with all Checkpoints required to display this logo.
Priority Three Triple AAA Cynthia Tested for Priority Three AAA level conformance with accessibility guidelines of the WCAG Small 31 by 88 pixel icon from the W3C this page is tested and passed accessibility Priority Three level AAA compliance. Wherever possible we have tried to assume that a user might not be using a mouse and comply with all Checkpoints required to display this logo.
Accessibility testing Small 31 by 88 pixel icon for Cynthia online page testing for US S 508 and W3C standards for accessibility. Every heretic Press page bearing this logo passes online verification with Cynthia for AAA accessibility. You can cut the URL of any page and paste it into the Cynthia online tester to check compliance.
Here-Tic The Hereticpress.com tick of approval for validated accessible websites, so far only awarded to Monash University and Griffith University.
:Heretic Stick figure human logo one Small 16 by 16 pixel transparent gif file which changes to a second stick figure below with its arms upright on a mouse rollover. The onfocus equivalent for this mouse rollover is to set the text to bold.
:Heretic Stick figure human logo two Another small cursor size graphic Small 16 by 16 pixel icon changes to a second stick above with its arms down on a mouse rollover. The onblur equivalent for this rollover is to set the text to normal.
This Heretic Press Masthead™ is height="254" width="340" This is only a preview of one of the full files which due to creative rights and 50% royalty agreements, a small fee is charged to access the full looping animations which is 480 frames long. The first 60 frames are shown here. This image file is usually a linked by the tag 
