About this website and accessibility
A Better Medway website has five main areas:
- The header contains the A Better Medway logo, accessibility links, print and search facility
- The 5 main columns contain links to each relevant page within that main section
- The menu on the left within in a main section contain the links to pages within that sections
- The 4 remaining sections are indicated by linksor sign posts below the menu on the left
- The middle column of a page contains the main text information for the page
- The right-hand side column contains links to tools available accross the site
- The events calandar box on the left provides a summary of events and links to the events page
- The newsletter box in the middle is to subscribe and unsubscribe to newsletters
- The footer, at the bottom of the page, contains additional navigation links and partner infomation
Accessibility help
The following sections describe some of the features that have been incorporated into this website to aid accessibility.
Accessibility statement
Medway Council is committed to ensuring accessibility of its website for people with disabilities. New and updated web content produced by the council conforms to W3C/WAI's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0, Conformance Level AA. The council is also committed to following the guidance provided by the Publicly Available Specification - 78 (PAS78) standard, developed by the Disability Rights Commission (DRC) in collaboration with the British Standards Institute.
Medway Council operates an internal monitoring program. Vendors supplying software used to develop the site will be required to provide information on conformance to W3C/WAI's Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines 1.0, Conformance Level AA. The council will review this policy in the future and consider updating it to an advanced version of W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
Access keys
Most browsers support jumping to specific links by typing certain keys defined on the web site. In Internet Explore for Windows, you can press ALT plus the listed access key; on Macintosh, you can press Control plus the listed access key. Pressing ENTER will then take you to that page. For a full list of browser access key modifiers please visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Access_key
All pages on this site define the following access keys:
- Access key c - Jump to content
- Access key m - Jump to main menu
- Access key u - Jump to top of page
- Access key h - Jump to homepage
- Access key l - Jump to login page
- Access key r - Jump to register page
- Access key a - Toggle between text only and graphics version
- Access key t - Open printer friendly page
Making the most of site accessibility features
There is more information below on specific accessibility features. Further help on how to get the best from your own operating system software is available on the BBC's help pages for:
- Windows (www.bbc.co.uk/accessibility/win/sub_root.shtml)
- Apple MAC (www.bbc.co.uk/accessibility/mac/sub_root.shtml)
- Linux (www.bbc.co.uk/accessibility/linux/sub_root.shtml)
Using assistive technologyAssistive technologies are products used by people with disabilities to help accomplish tasks that they cannot accomplish otherwise or could not do easily otherwise. When used with computers, assistive technologies are also referred to as adaptive software.
Some assistive technologies rely on output of other user agents, such as graphical desktop browsers, text browsers, voice browsers, multimedia players and plug-ins. Assistive technology comes in many different forms, including:
- alternative keyboards or switches
- braille and refreshable braille
- screen magnifiers
- sound notification
- screen readers
- speech recognition
- scanning software
- speech synthesis (speech output)
- tabbing through structural elements
- text browsers
- voice browsers
Medway Council tests its web pages against as many types of assistive technologies as it can to make the pages more accessible to you. If you find that you are unable to access any information using any assistive technology, please contact the council. If it cannot make the information accessible to you using your assistive technology, then it will try to find an alternative way for you to access or be provided with the information.
Tab indexing
The site is designed to make tabbing through a page easy. The order for tab indexing in a page is:
- accessibility links
- search site
- main navigation
- footer links
- home button (A Better Medway logo)
- header banner
- left hand side boxes
- main content
- right hand side boxes
- footer partner information
Images
- All content images used in this site include descriptive ALT attributes. Purely decorative graphics include null ALT attributes
- Complex images include LONGDESC attributes or inline descriptions to explain the significance of each image to non-visual readers
Visual design
- This site uses cascading style sheets for visual layout
- This site uses only relative font sizes, compatible with the user-specified "text size" option in visual browsers
- If your browser or browsing device does not support stylesheets at all, the content of each page is still readable
Standards compliance
- Most pages on this site comply with all priority 3 guidelines of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
- This site validates as XHTML 1.0 Transitional
- The stylesheets on this site are CSS 2
