Accessibility
Access to venues
For details of accessibility information for each of our venues, select the relevant venue below:
- Underbelly, Cowgate
- Underbelly's Baby Belly, Niddry St
- E4 UdderBELLY's Pasture (including E4 UdderBELLY, Cow Barn and new Daisy Cow)
Website Accessibility
In designing this website, we have sought to use design methods that maximise the accessibility of the website to all users, regardless of their method of accessing the website.
Structural mark-up
All our web pages are written in XHTML and CSS format using logical structural mark-up. For those who are not familiar with these terms, this means that the web page code is written in a way that labels every element on the page with its position in the structure of the page. For example, headings are labelled as such. Sections of the page are also grouped together in logical groupings and are listed in the code in a logical order.
All visual styling is done by defining CSS (cascading style sheet) styles that are applied to each element on the page. As a result, the visual design of the web page is kept separate from the structure and text on the page. As a result, non-visual browsers (eg screen-readers for the blind and partially sighted) can easily read the structure and text and can ignore the visual styling. View this page without styles and javascript.
Variable text size
All styling of text size on our website uses proportional sizing. This means that the body text and heading sizes are all defined by reference to a base text size. The base text size is the default size a user has set in their own browser. This means that the text size on the page can be controlled by the user allowing partially sighted users to significantly increase the text size to aide readability.
Some parts of our website also makes maximum use of the screen size and will use the full width of the browser window, regardless of its size. This is especially useful for those who want to use large text sizes and have a large screen as well.
Alt text
In accordance with good practice for accessible web design, we provide "alt" text descriptions for every image. This is an alternative text description to replace an image for non-visual browsers. It is also used for tool-tips in some browsers when the cursor hovers over the image and is also displayed by most browsers if the image itself is unavailable (eg due to a bad URL link).
Text only pages
As our website is relatively extensive and uses proper structural mark-up, we believe the marginal benefit of providing text only web pages as well as the visual web pages is not justified. We do not have the resources to maintain a full text only alternative and there would be the risk of inconsistencies as amendments are made to the main site. All of our pages should degrade gracefully in that they should still be easily readable and navigable even when images, CSS and javascript are turned off.
Javascript
As with many websites, we use some javascript to enhance the functionality of our website. However, we have kept its use to a minimum and in most cases ensure that alternative features are available to those browsing without access to javascript or with javascript turned off. In very few cases, javascript may be the only way of accessing a particular feature. If you come across a feature that does not work without javascript that is critical to your enjoyment or access to the website, please send us feedback or contact us and we will see if we can use an alternative structure to achieve the same or equivalent functionality.
Web standards, plug-ins and proprietary tags
We try to ensure that are web pages comply with the XHTML 1.0 Transitional and CSS web standards as published by the World Wide Web Consortium to achieve platform and browser independence. However, not all browser/platform combinations actually adhere to the web standards and so certain elements of our site may not display properly in your browser. We hope that this will usually be the fault of your browser rather than our web code. If you think our web pages are not displaying properly, send us feedback or contact us.
We do not support the use of plug-ins and proprietary tags that are only available on certain browsers or platforms.