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New Internet Presentation

For several months the work on the new web pages of the Universität Dortmund has been going on. Since December they are online: with a professional layout, a new menu and new contents. At the beginning of the year 2001 a team of employees from the administration, the Centre for Communication and Information Processing and scientists from the Universität Dortmund worked out a concept for the relaunch of www.uni-dortmund.de.

The intention was to modernize the Internet presentation and to make it more user-friendly and informative. The pages have been programmed in cooperation with the professionals from the Internet agency "eskatoo". The basis of the new pages is a number of programmes, which automatically generate the data structure, the menu and the single files with only a few "mouse clicks".

One single text file for example creates the three-stage menus, which give a quick overview of the single information pages. Modifications in this file are automatically passed on to all pages. It is not necessary to adapt all web pages with a lot of effort by hand.

Therefore even laymen are able to process the contents in an editorial way after a short training period. That's why the university expects a clear plus as far as the topicality of the Internet pages is concerned. Eventually the world wide web meanwhile has become one of the most important information media: for the people who want to study, for the media, for scientists and companies.
In the first phase the central pages have been adapted to the new design. At present the presentations of the departments and the chairs, the institutes and the service facilities are being revised.

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The Text Version - Page Design for Visually Handicapped People at the Touch of a Button 

Interactive graphics, online videos, animations - everything that makes the Internet pages real interesting for people who can see, often presents an invincible obstacle for visually handicapped people. That is different with the new Internet presentation of the Universität Dortmund: the text version also offers barrier free access to the information for visually handicapped Internet surfers.

There are two fundamental ways of designing internet pages suitable for visually handicapped people. The pages can be programmed in such a way that visually handicapped people can easily cope with them. But this strongly limits the design possibilities, the homepages would become unattractive for people who can see. The alternative: a parallel text version for the same presentation. As this clearly means higher maintenance efforts, most providers of web pages decide to do without it. Whereas the Universität Dortmund has been taking into account the interests of visually handicapped people right from the beginning of the relaunch. A special programme automatically generates text versions in German and English. This way the maintenance effort remains nil.  Editorial alterations, innovations and additions are identically copied out into the text version. While doing so, nearly everything that makes it difficult for visually handicapped people to read the pages has been thrown overboard. However, the clearly arranged user guidance is maintained.