The public beginning of the ISLRR was announced in 1999 at the International Low Vision Conference in Madrid. The ISLRR website was originally hosted at Lighthouse International. In February 2002 a webmaster was contracted, domain names ISLRR.ORG and ISVRR.ORG were registered, and a commercial hosting plan was selected. The ISLRR website was transferred from the Lighthouse International domain to the new ISLRR domain.
All code for the ISLRR website is edited directly using the text editor UltraEdit, rather than through a WYSIWYG interface like Microsoft Word, there by escaping proprietary and redundant overtagging. This attention to code results in faster load time, clear results, and independence from proprietary browser unconformities.
Accessibility adjustment for the ISLRR website began with simplification of the existing site and following section 508 accessability guidelines. Section 508 accessability problems with the website were initially discovered though audit using the A-Prompt (Accessibility Prompt) software program.
A-Prompt is a software program designed to improve web site accessibility for people with various disabilities. By evaluating html programming of web pages for accessibility barriers and making repairs to correct those problems, A-Prompt helps web developers and content authors create sites that are accessible to the widest possible audience.
A-Prompt is based on accessibility guidelines developed and maintained by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), a branch of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
This software tool is made available through the collaborative efforts of the University of Toronto's Adaptive Technology Resource Centre and the TRACE Center at the University of Wisconsin. Both research groups are dedicated to improving the availability and accessibility of information technologies for people with disabilities.
Following the lead of the Royal National Institute of the Blind, an online accessability checking service named Bobby was use to further evaluate for the ISLRR website accessibility. Use of Bobby was later discontinued in favor of non-comercial validators.
MarkUp Validation Service and CSS Validation Service from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) are used to not only bring the ISLRR website to the highest levels of accessorily, but to also conform to rigorous HTML and XHTML standards insuring compatibility with international guidelines for conformity on the World Wide Web.
The Web Design Group Tools are used to help ensure the ISLRR web site to be non-browser specific, non-resolution specific, and accessible to all users worldwide.
The Cache Now! campaign web site is reviewed to concider options concerning problems with cached temporary web site elements on proxy servers and in browser cache. ISLRR web site pages subject to change are served with a Last-Modified date HTTP header tags, and ocasionally, when sever problems warant more stringent action, pages are served with with expiration tags.
The Web Page Purifier is used to check WebTV accessability of the ISLRR website.
The Mozilla (1.3a) is used to insure ISLRR web site conformity with this new browser. The ISLRR web site heading logo was changed from interlaced to non-interlaced GIF to be compatable with this and other new browsers.
The Lynx Viewer is used to confirm ISLRR website compatibility with text-mode web browsers.
The CSSCheck is used to raise the ISLRR website's Style Sheet conformity beyond W3C CSS Validation. The only remaining warnings are based upon the ISLRR Board's decision to used fixed large font sizes on the ISLRR web site. Fixed large font sizes for web site accessibility are also promoted by Lighthouse International. The oposing view of use of fixed font sizes may be found at the Diversity Compliance web site.
Tilman Hausherr's Link Sleuth (TM) is used to test the ISLRR web site for broken internal and external links. This link tester is the fastest and most accurate of all the link testers we tested and is also free of charge.
The Amaya Editor/Browser is also used to evaluate the structure and content of the ISLRR website. Amaya produces content that conforms to the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Using Amaya in conjunction with the World Wide Web Consortium's HTML Validation Service covers compliance in greater detail then either separately.
In the fall of 2001 the ISLRR logo was changed from a blue square symbol like the cover of the ISLRR Visual Impairment Research journal to the red circular symbol combining a globe with an eye to recognise ISLRR work in vision and internationalism.
The world map used on the top of the ISLRR website pages is actually exacted from a composite satellite image obtained from NASA at their Blue Marble web site.
The Blue Marble contains the most detailed true-color images of the entire Earth to date. Using a collection of satellite-based observations, scientists and visualizers stitched together months of observations of the land surface, oceans, sea ice, and clouds into a seamless, mosaic of every square kilometer of our planet.
This site specifically uses the Land Surface, Shallow Water, and Shaded Topography 2048 by 1024 pixels (1.8 MB TIFF) as a basis for our much smaller monochromatic image.
Upon receipt of authorization to publish the Vision 2002 conferance abstracts, the search engine Perlfect Search 3.30 © was chosen and modified to help serve the new content.
Perlfect Search 3.30 © is a sophisticated, powerful, versatile, customizable and effective site indexing/searching suite available under an open source license. It comes as a pair of disctinct scripts. The indexer, that automatically scans and indexes a web site, and the search engine, a cgi script that serves search queries for keywords over the index, and displays results pages in html, in a standard format including title, description and relevance ranking for each matching document. Advanced features include stopwords, a potent exclude mechanism and a handy automatic installation and configuration utility.
As the Privacy Notice for this web site mentions, all access to the ISLRR web site is recorded. Error and access records are checked regularly to identifying system performance or problem areas, identify unauthorized attempts to upload or change information, and identify attempts to otherwise cause damage or conduct criminal activity. System performance problems discovered from error an access records are addressed immediately. Access record data is used for research into site technical design variations. In events of unauthorized access attempts the service providers of offenders are informed and, depending on the severity of the activity, reports are filed with the National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC) branch of the FBI.
Effective March 1, 2003, the NIPC officially moved into the new Department of Homeland Security under the Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection (IAIP) Directorate, there to be joined with the Critical Infrastructure Assurance Office from the Department of Commerce, the Energy Security and Assurance Office from the Department of Energy, the Federal Computer Incident Response Center from the General Services Office, the National Communications System from the Department of Defense, and the National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center from Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories.
Work is underway to translate the content of the ISLRR website in consideration of the multi-lingual membership and scope of the ISLRR. Various language translation software solutions were investigated but the results were found unacceptable to the ISLRR Board and membership. The ISLRR is now considering resources of the international low vision community and bids from commercial language translation agencies.
Spanish translation of the primary pages for the ISLRR website is complete. A link to the translated home page is available at the top of the ISLRR website home page.
Now the ISLRR website checks the "accept language" field sent by your web browser to determine the appropriate version of the ISLRR website to deliver to you. The browser you are using to access the ISLRR website today told the ISLRR web server that it accepts "en-us,en;q=0.5", so you will see the default English language version when http://www.islrr.org/ is visited.
Projects are also underway to give ISLRR membership various online resources including an interface to update their membership contact information and ability to publish links to their websites on an ISLRR resources page.
Other access issues are also under investigation including Web Accessible Phone and PDA content provisions.
