About this Site

Accessibility
Editorial Policy
Technical Information
Authors
Web Production Team

Accessibility

Every attempt has been made to make this site compliant with Section 508 of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Additionally, we have provided a link to a detailed Site Index on every page. This index provides a direct link to most pages in the site for simple text navigation.

Please notify us of any specific accessibility problems that you encounter, or any suggestions you might have on how we could improve the site's access. Please email these comments and suggestions to: mmc@mmc.gov.

Editorial Policy

This site is managed by the Marine Mammal Commission. As a federal government site, all federal editorial policies apply, such as those on privacy, copyright, commercial promotion, etc.

Materials posted on this site are reviewed by Commission professional staff prior to publishing. Final decisions are made by the site's editorial board. All material on the site resides in the public domain and can be freely distributed. Use of appropriate photo and image credits is requested.

Technical Information

Browsers. This site is best viewed in Netscape, version 6.0 and above, or Internet Explorer, version 5.0 and above. Web site visitors using earlier versions of these browsers may encounter occasional format anomalies when viewing and printing pages from the Web site. Performance of this site has not been tested on browsers other than Netscape and Internet Explorer.

Access Time. Some pages on this site contain numerous images. The images provide necessary visual supplements for the text and enhance the visual appeal of the page. Pages have been developed to load text first.

Links. Links are provided to many external Web sites as reference or to provide supplemental material. External sites that are accessed by these links will launch a new browser session in a single, separate browser window. Each external site that is accessed will appear in this same browser window until the window is closed. A limited number of links to non-U.S. government sites are included. Users are notified that they are leaving a U.S. government Web site by a separate page that appears on screen for approximately 20 seconds.

Fonts and Type Sizes. Verdana is the default font for this site; 10 point is the default size. All browsers allow users to select specific fonts and type sizes for display. Some users select large type sizes for ease of reading, or specific fonts for personal tastes. The text and layout should not be adversely affected by a user's selection of alternative fonts and type sizes.

Printing Pages. This site has been designed to ensure simple printing. We recommend printing in landscape format at a scale of 100 percent. Printing in portrait format at 100 percent may result in some parts of the extreme right side of a page being cut off. For printing in portrait format, we recommend printing at a scale of 90 percent.

Downloadable Documents. Some documents are available on this site as downloadable files in Portable Document Format (pdf). These files can be viewed on microcomputers equipped with recent versions of Adobe Acrobat Reader. Adobe Acrobat Reader can be downloaded for free.

There are some known issues with downloading PDF documents, particularly on Windows systems, due to conflicting changes in the way in which Acrobat Reader and various browsers talk to one another. But there is a simple work-around: if you right-click (Windows) or option-click (Macintosh) on the link, the entire file will be sent to your machine, and then you can open it off your own hard drive using Acrobat Reader.

Navigation. Navigation through the site is straightforward. There are four levels of navigation. The first level is access to the major sections of the site at the left of each page. The second level is subsections within the left hand column major sections. The third level is within-page navigation found at the top of some pages that includes links to sections within the page. The fourth level includes text links within page content. These links take the user to external links related to the topic of the page or to supplement pages within the Marine Mammal Commission Web site.

Index and Search This Site. These two links appear on every page and provide additional access assistance. The Site Index is a complete listing of every page on the site. Search is a standard word/phrase search through all text and documents (pdf) on the site's pages.

Authors

Suzanne Montgomery, Marine Mammal Commission

Web Production Team

Jerry Lau, NOAA/Communications and Education Division
Davida Remer, NOAA/Communications and Education Division
Mike Shelby, NOAA/Communications and Education Division

For additional technical information:
mmc@mmc.gov

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