Learn Our Web

Getting Around the Boston College Web Site
Accessibility and Keyboard Navigation
Valid Code Initiative
Feedback and Question Forms

Getting Around
The new site brings a visual design standard and a common navigation system to every page. The design and interface standards are integrated through a Universal Header, Standard Left Navigation, and a Standard Footer:

Universal Header
Across the top of this page there is tan and black Universal Header. The Universal Header will be on every page in the new site, and provides links to seven key areas:

1. The Boston College logo on the left links back to the BC home page. This home page is primarily designed for external audiences (prospective students, alumni, visitors, and the general public).
2. BCInfo links to the home page for the BC community (students, faculty, staff) with current news and information related to Boston College.
3. A-Z is the best resource for finding a person, department, or a Web site. AZ has links to a site map, and a site index as well as a variety of other resources.
4. Search allows direct access to search by keyword. The Search generally defaults to searching the entire BC site, but can also search most institutional BC Web sites.
5. Directories is the link to use to get contact information for any person or department at Boston College.
6. Contact BC provides forms for providing feedback about the site a list of the most frequently requested phone numbers, and information on campus mailing addresses and e-mail addresses.
7. The second band across the top of the page is called the"breadcrumb trail." It starts with "bc home >" and ends with the page you are on. In between you'll find links to related, more general information at "higher" levels of the BC Web site. If the page you are on is close to, but not exactly the information you are looking for, moving up one or two levels using the breadcrumb trail links may enable you to find exactly what you want.

Standard Left Navigation
Looking at the left side of this page, there is a tan column used to outline the content of the site, and provide a standard set of navigational links. This standard left side navigation using tan shading will be also be used throughout all departmental Web sites.

All main site categories are presented in CAPS, and when clicked on, the left side navigation expands to show all of the subheadings. When you click on a link along the left side navigation, any subcategories will be within a lighter shade of tan. The page you are on is highlighted on the left navigation by a small maroon double arrow "»", and the title text of the page you are on will be black.

Standard Footer
Every page within the new site design has a standard footer with an "Updated" date, the actual URL of the page, useful contact info, a link to this Learn Our Web resource, Feedback, and a link to back to the top of the page.

Accessibility and Keyboard Navigation
We at Boston College are taking a proactive approach to Web accessibility by following the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (at the time 1.0) and the Section 508 guidelines (which were still being developed) for Web accessibility.

We believe that a user, regardless of ability or accessing device (browser, screen reader, mobile technologies), should be able to access our content and Web environment in a simple and usable fashion. For those who do not use a mouse, and even for those who do, we have built into our new design keyboard navigation to access our whole environment and particular parts of a given page simply by giving a keyboard command.

Keyboard navigation requires a relatively recent, standards compliant browser (Netscape 6.x, Internet Explorer 5.x). Mac and Windows users will experience differences in the way keyboard navigation works. Note that the number keys refer to the normal number keys directly above the letter keys, not the "F" keys or the numeric key pad on some keyboards.

Mac users should hold down the Control key while pressing one of the number keys (see list below). If the number leads to a link, you will immediately jump to that page. It it is not a link, the cursor will be moved to the point on the page indicated.

Windows users should hold down the Alt key while pressing one of the the number keys listed below. This will take you to the location on the page described in the list below. If the target is a link, the link will be selected and you can jump to that page by pressing the Enter key.

List of Keyboard Functions

Valid Code Initiative
All of our templates validate to the XHTML 1.0 specification. We believe that pages having valid code will render optimally under the various browsers/operating system combinations. Valid code is a stepping stone to ensure Web accessibility.

Site owners & maintainers use a Web site management tool, which we've built in-house, called WebIT. WebIT has a "Validate Pages" option which allows site owners to validate their entire site with the click of a button. Behind the scenes, WebIT runs the W3C's html validator, and if any errors are found, a link is provided to the content owner to view the results page which lists the error(s) that are on the page (since our templates are already validated, it's the content added that holds the errors).

For more information on WebIT, please visit the WebIT support site.

Feedback and Question Forms
Comments and inquiries about the Boston College Web site are encouraged, use the Feedback link in the footer at anytime to send us general questions or comments on the BC Web site. For questions or comments on a specific school, department or office site, use the local contact information page within that site.