This gateway currently has two related purposes:
1. To make the Web easier to access for the visually impaired; 2. To allow speakers of other languages to view Web pages written in them, when the encodings are not supported by their browsers.
For help on a particular option, jump straight to the options list. There is also a common problems section.
Users of earlier versions may like to note that the language translation facility has been removed due to inadequacies; also the ``Leave smileys etc as they are'' option has been replaced by ``Perform smiley substitution'' (ie. substitution is now off by default), because it is slow for large Web pages and you should only enable it if you really want it.
A description of the gateway follows.
Most of the documents on the World Wide Web are written in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). HTML allows links to other documents to be embedded within a document. Should a link be selected, an attempt will be made to fetch and display the second document. This may be stored on a completely different computer. Hence, the whole thing can become a world wide ``web'' of documents and links between documents.
The documents that you view on the World Wide Web may not have been stored on any computer. Instead, they may have been generated, by a computer program running on that computer, especially for your request. As the user, you may know little difference between a program retrieving the document from storage and a program generating it.
Programs that generate documents can be given parameters. This will usually involve you filling in some kind of ``form'' and ``submitting'' it. The computer that your computer is communicating with will then be told what you have put in the form, and it can use this information while generating the document that it returns as a result (the remote computer can also store the information if necessary).
It is also possible to embed parameters in a link, to be put in a document. Thus, if you as user were to activate the link, it would be as though you had filled in a form with those parameters.
When you view the ``access gateway'', you have a form, which allows you to type in the URL of some other document on the World Wide Web, for the gateway to retrieve. There are also several options that allow you to customise what the gateway does to pages. To get to most of them, you need to press one of the buttons under the URL box; this arrangement is to keep the main form simple.
You do not have to set any of the options at this point; if for any reason you are not happy with them at some later point, or if you would like to jump to a different page on the World Wide Web that is not in any of the links, then you may return to the form later. This is done by following a link at the top of whatever page is being displayed, called ``Change access options''. When you do this, the options will be as you left them previously, except that the page's URL will be changed to whatever page you were just viewing, if it were different from the one that you had entered previously (because you had followed a link).
Saving your options: Once you have found your preferred options, you can save them on most browsers by either bookmarking the page, or setting it as your home or start page. The method of doing this will depend on the software that you are using, so please consult the menus, the online help, the documentation, or the next person in the computer room.
Note that it is sometimes possible to accidentally leave the access gateway by following a link in a document, even though the program modifies links so that they ``go through'' the gateway. This can happen, for example, if you have enabled Javascript, the document contains a Javascript program, and that program causes your Web browser to retrieve a different page directly. Normally, this should not happen, although there are an increasing number of Javascript programs offering the user a menu of documents to retrieve.
In addition, the gateway can only process HTML documents. If you retrieve a document that is not HTML, you will get a message about this, and a direct link to the document.
What follows are brief explanations of the various options on the form. To submit the form, press the ``Get page'' button. You can read on through the options or you can select a link. Disable all sight-related options Password button Characters button Access button Colours button Size button Options button Extensions button
If you really want the gateway to allow Javascript through, switch on this option. Note, however, that the Javascript might manipulate URLs in a way that is incompatible with the gateway. You might be taken out of the gateway, your settings might be overridden, or the page might not work at all. Use with care.
You may like to select this but leave the ``Leave frames as they are'' option off. In this case, frames will be written out, but, should you find a frame that really would be easier as a frame, you can switch on ``Leave frames as they are'' and the formatting will still be removed.
Please note that tables may still be corrupted by the code that moves link banners to the bottom. If you select this option, then you might like to consider also selecting ``don't move link banner to bottom'' below.
You may like to select this but leave the ``Leave tables as they are'' option off. In this case, tables will be written out, but, should you find a table that really would be easier as a table, you can switch on ``Leave tables as they are'' and the formatting will still be removed.
The algorithm used to detect banners is liable to change; from time to time I try to improve it. Ideally it should move the banner and no more than the banner (it should not move the start of the text to the bottom); it should not interfere with small, manageable banners and it should not interfere with genuine index or contents pages. However, deciding what ``rules of thumb'' to give to a computer that doesn't understand the content of the page is not easy to do well.
If you enable this option, the program will replace this idiom with the word ``grin'' in parentheses, so that it can be read properly by a speech synthesiser. It also replaces numerous other similar idioms. However, switching on this option also slows down the program considerably for large Web pages, so you should only use it if you need to.
A query is either a list of words separated by spaces (in which case all of the words must be present for the query to match), or a set of alternative lists separated by commas. For example, ``research groups, PhD'' will match text containing both ``research'' and ``groups'', and also text containing ``PhD''. Case does not matter. Note that queries do not remain in effect when you follow links.
If your browser does not support SSL (encrypted pages), you should check this option if it appears, and note that you have to trust your link to the gateway when you are using it for secure sites. Also if you are using an SSL gateway and you want it to use ONLY encrypted connections to your browser (regardless of whether or not the remote site is SSL) then you should use this option to stop the gateway from switching to non-SSL.
It would not be feasible for the access gateway to cope with all possible changes of style within a link and re-write the HTML accordingly, since some style changes may be introduced after the access gateway has been written. Further, future versions of Netscape may correct the problem. This box, then, is a ``quick hack''. Selecting it causes the font to be reset at the end of every link. A side effect of this is that any changes that documents make to the font may be reversed in places. This does not matter if you are overriding document fonts anyway.
If this option is selected, then the gateway will send cookies, but it won't start removing the redundant options from the links until it has confirmed that your browser is returning its cookies. This normally happens on the second page that you fetch, but you might like to check that cookie support is turned on in your browser.
Many websites use ``cookies'', which are small amounts of data that are stored by your browser and sent back to the site every time you get a new page. They are usually used to identify your session (like a customer number) so that the site can collect statistics about their visitors.
Cookies do not work through mediators like the access gateway, but some sites are made in such a way that they don't work without them (and sometimes it's not obvious why they're not working). For this reason, the gateway will store any cookies the site sends as settings in your options, to be sent back to the site. The space for storing cookies is limited; it is not intended to be a full implementation of the cookies standard, only enough to allow you access to sites that refuse entry without cookies.
If you prefer that the gateway ignores cookies sent by remote sites, use this option.
In any event, only cookies from documents are stored; cookies from images are dealt with by your browser, since images are fetched directly and not through the gateway.
Some browsers (notably NCSA Mosaic) do not support different font sizes, but do display their headings larger. If you are stuck with one of those then you can choose one of the headings instead of a font size. However, due to a limitation in HTML, this has side-effects, notably the addition of many line breaks (especially if you have the ``fix Netscape font/link bug'' option turned on, which you probably don't need if you don't have Netscape).
Computers work in numbers, and a Web page is really lots of numbers. Every letter of the English alphabet has a number, and your browser knows which English letter or symbol to display for each number. Other alphabets also have numbers, and things like Chinese characters have big numbers because there are lots of them. The big numbers have to be split into smaller numbers, because each number has to fit in a small space. Numbers for other alphabets and for Chinese characters are often the same numbers as the ones that are used by English, so, if the computer is programmed to display English, then pages in other languages might look like random English letters and symbols.
Even if the computer is programmed to display another language, it can still go wrong sometimes. This is because some languages have several different ways of numbering the letters, or different ways of splitting the big numbers into smaller ones, and if your computer is programmed to use one or more of these ways then you can still get pages that are written in other ways.
This program can read pages that are written in one of these ways, and give them to your computer as pictures. Pages are not normally written in this way, partly because it takes more time and computer memory. The gateway can also be asked to give the characters to your computer in other encodings (such as UTF-8); this is quicker than pictures but is not supported by all browsers.
You normally only need to tell the program which language the page is in. The languages in the drop-down boxes are sorted alphabetically by their English names, and you can get near a language by pressing its first letter on most browsers. The program will detect between the various types of encodings appropriate to the language, and I hope to improve this detection code in future. If you want to override the detection to a particular encoding, then you can do this by pressing ``Override'' after getting the page.
If you have some experience in converting between encodings, then you may be concerned about documents that encode high bytes as HTML numerical ampersand sequences. This program should cope with them automatically. If for some reason you do not want this to happen, select the ``Don't decode HTML escapes before interpreting characters'' box.
Normally the gateway will try to detect the character set being used by the text, independently of what the Web server says it is, since many Web servers are configured to give wrong information. However, the gateway does process certain ``charset'' headers, if they are appropriate to the language being displayed. Select the ``Always ignore `charset' headers'' box if you would prefer the gateway to always ignore these headers.
The ``Images (ask browser to enlarge)'' option, if present, will cause the HEIGHT and WIDTH tags to be doubled in value. On some web browsers (including recent versions of Netscape and Internet Explorer), this causes the characters to be doubled in size.
The ``alternative base URL for images'' box is mainly for situations where more than one image server is available. It is normally set to a sensible default by the webmaster on the language entry form, and can be left alone unless you really know what you're doing.
Note: The access gateway program is written in such a way that it can be run on different web servers. Some webmasters may decide not to include the encoding options, or not to include the images, to save space. If you find that these options are not available, then that is the explanation.