We aim to make our website usable for all our customers by following standards developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (a website link can be found at the bottom of page). The WWW Consortium rates accessible sites from Level A to Level AAA. We have followed government guidelines to develop our site to Level AA and wherever possible, to make it more accessible to all users. Our aim is to enable customers to access services and information in a way that does not disadvantage them whatever their access or ability needs.

We acknowledge that we have not achieved all of our aims in this area and we will continue to develop our site to provide the highest standards we are able within the available means.

In order to ensure our website provides universal usability we will:

• Keep pages simple, using white space and simple layout
• Use Arial font in clear contrasting colours, mainly black and blue for body text and avoid the use of small type
• Use consistent presentation, style, colour and language throughout - unless this presents difficulties in conveying meaning
• Avoid reliance on colour to convey information
• Ensure simple and consistent navigation
• Produce content that is brief and easy to understand, but ensure that in-depth information is available to those who want or need it
• Keep images to a minimum size and number to maintain faster download speeds
• Ensure people know when they are leaving our site if following a link
• Avoid the use of downloads where we can provide text within the site
• Maintain the site with up-to-date and useful information
• Avoid the use of tables for layout purposes and where we use tables try to make them accessible

Our key accessibility aims

Our aim is to meet the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative Level AA on as many pages as we are able dependent on budget, technical ability and resources. We will continue to develop our site to reach the highest level of accessibility at the earliest opportunity.

Navigation on our website has been developed with our customers' needs at the forefront of development. We aim to provide easy, consistent, navigation based around customer needs, rather than our own structures. In order to make navigation easier we have introduced links from our A - Z of Services direct to content to enable customers to use an alternative text based navigation and our site map will be published in 2007.  To assist customers who are unsure whether they require county or district council services we have tried to include deep links to county council services too.

We try to be consistent throughout our site in style, presentation and language. We also provide telephone and email contacts on every page should you require further information.

We understand that our site is primarily an information and transactional tool for our customers and aim to limit the number of images on our site to ensure faster download times. We aim not to include graphs or charts if at all possible and where these are used we will include a text based summary.

At present we have a number of tables within our site that may not make sense when read with a screen reader. Our tables are used for data and not layout. We are looking at ways that we can reduce tables and wherever possible introduce tables that are accessible.

We aim to include alternative tags that aid screen readers to describe images. We also plan to introduce title tags on images and hyperlinks where appropriate and to provide captioning and transcripts for audio if it is used. 

On introduction of our content management system, our hyperlinks will include information that make sense when read by a screen reader and we will warn people that they will be leaving our site by using a simple icon. 

We aim to limit the use of attachments, trying where possible to ensure that as much content as possible is provided within the site. Where we have included an attachment we will include a summary of the document, including number of pages, file size, a brief description of the content and a contact number to call should you prefer to have a copy sent to you.

We will provide links to Adobe Acrobat for all attachments. You can convert an Adobe Acrobat file to HTML if you wish by using the web address (URL) then visiting the Adobe website (see the link below). Once there you will see an online form. Paste the web address of the Acrobat file you copied from our site into the box and the contents of the file will be converted to HTML, which should be accessible.

For more information about accessibility support and adaptations follow the link below to the aidis website.

Date Updated: 02/05/08