Beacon Bits December 2009

Dear Friend,

First and foremost, the staff and volunteers at Mystic Valley Elder Services (MVES) would like to wish you and yours a safe and joyful holiday season.

Along with frenetic shopping, wish lists, travel, and religious celebrations, the holiday season is the perfect time to express thanks and we are grateful to have you as readers of The Beacon and Beacon Bits.

We’re also thankful that we’ve completed the redesign of our web site, www.mves.org. You may have noticed it if you read November’s Beacon.

We’re proud of our new web site because it conveys important information about MVES in an accessible manner. We made a major effort to design a good-looking site that offers accessibility features to all our visitors. The features include:

Font Size. You can now change the font size on the web site. Want a slightly larger font size? Simply click on the “A” at the top of any page.

Contrast. For some people with vision impairment, it’s easier to read light-colored text against a dark background. Users to the new site can quickly change pages to have a dark blue background and white text by changing the contrast option at the top of each page.

Navigation. Drop-down menus—those menus that appear when you move your mouse over a word—are cool. Unfortunately, they can be difficult to use for someone with limited dexterity. On our new site, we've eliminated these menus and have instead used easily-clickable tabs. We’ve also included a “breadcrumb” trail on each page so you know exactly where you are in the site.

CSS/XHTML gobbledygook. Yes, it’s web developer language, but it means that we built the site using best practices in current technology. With this technology, the site is optimized to be read by screen reader software that is utilized by visually-impaired individuals. And, this gobbledygook is validated code—kind of like the web equivalent of writing grammatically correct sentences.

We hope you’ll visit our new site. Please e-mail us with any suggestions about the site or The Beacon/Beacon Bits.

Again, thank you for reading. Enjoy the holidays.