Accessibility


The volunteers of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, who are the authors of this WildFlower web site, take accessibility very seriously. We have worked hard to make the site friendly to screen readers like VoiceOver and TalkBack. By default, screen readers generally announce the hidden "titles" on a page, and consequently we have made a lot of use of them in this site. If you've turned these off in the settings of your screen reader, you might consider turning them back on. It is worth noting that screen readers generally mangle the pronunciation of the "Botanical Latin" of plant scientific names. For that reason, we have tended to down-play the use of the scientific names, at least in these hidden titles.

We are aware that the half-dozen "Text Search" pages are very large and that they can be a problem for screen readers. Unless you have a fast device, it is probably best to avoid using a screen reader on these large pages because your device may become quite sluggish attempting to read them. Unfortunately, there is no simple way around this when searching through thousands of items (i.e., they must all be on the same page for your browser's search function to operate on them as a group). Fortunately, none of these pages are essential to the operation of the site, and they are all clearly labeled, so they should be easy to avoid.

Other accessibility features include copious off-screen titles for screen readers, increasing overall text size and line spacing, streamlining text formatting, creating long descriptive link names, eliminating abbreviations when feasible and/or spacing out their letters to encourage screen readers to spell them out, providing alternate "Large Text" versions of some pages, giving the user the ability to choose different background and text colors, and employing an accessible color palette.

Beyond this, please let us know if there is anything else we can do to help you enjoy the Wildflower web site. It is the product of thousands of hours of work on the part of the volunteers of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. We want you to enjoy using it as much as we have enjoyed creating it.




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