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 Web site for people with disabilities. The CityArk website has been designed to conform to W3C/WAI's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0, Conformance Level A.

Access keys

Most browsers support jumping to specific links by typing certain keys defined on the web site. In 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.

All pages on the CityArk site define the following access keys:

• Access key 0 - Skip Navigation
• Access key 1 - Home Page
• Access key 2 - Accessibility Help (this page)
• Access key 3 - Text Only version of the current page
• Access key 4 - Search (basic Java query interface)
• Access key 5 - Search (advanced Java query interface)
• Access key 6 - Search (graphical search interface)
• Access key 7 - Search (text-based search interface)
• Access key A - About medway archives
• Access key M - Medway Council Home Page

Making the most of our site accessibility features

Using assistive technology

Assistive 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, some of these include;

• 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

As part of our accessibility statement we will test our pages against as many types of assistive technologies as we can to make the pages more accessible to you. If you do find that you are unable to access any information using any assistive technology then please contact us. If we cannot make the information accessible to you using your assistive technology, then we 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 as follows:

• Accessibility links
• Global navigation
• Breadcrumb navigation
• CityArk left-hand-side links (where present)
• Main content links

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 (CSS 1) 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 are Bobby A approved, complying with all priority 1 guidelines of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
• This site validates as XHTML 1.0 Transitional.
• The stylesheets on this site are CSS 1.

The following are conformance badges relating to the accessibility and technical standards of this website.