Skip to main page content (AccessKey S)
Undiscovered Scotland's look and feel is designed to allow effective and attractive presentation of information; to ensure the site complies with accepted HTML and CSS standards; and to ensure accessibility.
Pages produced as part of the design validate against both the HTML 4.01 transitional standard and the level 2 CSS2 specification using the W3C's markup validation service and their CSS validation service. The only exceptions to HTML 4.01 compliance are in the expression of the addresses of some external links.
Pages on the site are Bobby AAA Approved, signifying they meet Priority 1, 2 and 3 checkpoints of the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0. This process is to some extent judgemental, as once key criteria are met, it is up to webmasters to check a number of further issues manually. In carrying out these further checks we have drawn on the excellent online resource Dive Into Accessibility and used the colour blindness simulator at Vischeck to ensure adequate separation of colour information.
The site design looks, feels and performs (almost) identically on Microsoft Internet Explorer 9.0, 8.0, 7.0 and 6.0; Mozilla Firefox 20 and earlier; Opera 11.0 and earlier to at least Opera 7; Safari 5.0 to 3.1; Google Chrome 8.0; and Netscape 7.2. It has also been sample tested successfully on emulations of Safari 1.2 and Lynx 2.8.4. It does not work on Netscape 4.7.
The design looks at its best on a screen definition (or in a window) of 1024x768. It has been tested and works adequately at higher screen definitions up to 1920x1200. At a screen definition of 800x600 some of the navigational components start to overlap, but the site is still usable. At a definition of 640x480 you can still use the site, but the layout is largely lost and a lot of scrolling is required. On many mobile devices the site can be used with a great deal of scrolling: and a set of Mobile Menus have been introduced to allow easier navigation.