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Last revised: 21 May 2008

About this website

The Kennet District Council website pages has six main areas on the majority of its pages.. The areas are

1- Header  -At the top of the page containing links to  log-on, home page,  A-Z of services, contact details, online services, news, events, site map, help and a text only link. The Kennet District Council logo will also appear which links back to the home page if clicked on

2 Breadcrumb Trail -  Underneath the header is the breadcrumb trail which will give links back the main pages associated with the page you are in.

3 - Left Hand Search and Navigation  The search appears at the top of the left hand navigation and will allow you to search for content by entering keywords. Results will appear on a new page and categorized. The left hand navigation is divided into thirteen areas. By click on an area a sub menu will appear along with the main page and right hand navigation. this column also contains Kennet District Council contact details.

4 Main Content -  The main content appears in the middle section of the page. It contains  the relevant information. The title of the page appears at the top of the page in heading one format. When the page is printed this section only will be printed along with a printer footer.

5 Right Hand  Navigation -  Links to related pages will appear in the right hand navigation. Notices will also on occasion appear.

6 Footer -  Related pages will appear on the footer as well as links to  some of our corporatee areas of the website.

Accessibility Help more info

The following sections describe some of the features that have been incorporated into this website to aid accessibility. Kennet District Council believes that all of it's online content should be accessible to all.

You will also find practical steps to help you configure your browser to the settings that are best for you.

If you have any questions or comments on the information below, please feel free to email us at webmaster@kennet.gov.uk.

Accessibility Statement

Kennet District Council is committed to ensuring accessibility of its Web site for people with disabilities. New and updated Web content produced by our organisation conforms to W3C/WAI's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0, Conformance Level AA.

We will review this policy in the future to consider updating it to an advanced version of W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines once available.

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:

  • Header

    navigation

  • Breadcrumb navigation

  • Right Hand Navigation

  • Main content links

  • Left Hand Navigation

  • Footer Navigation

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.

If you are having difficulty accessing PDF documents on this site please visit the Adobe Accessibility site (External link) .

Use of style sheets

This site makes extensive use of stylesheets to control the layout, colour scheme and fonts.

Because the website employs stylesheets, users can view pages using their preferred settings. People with dyslexia, for example, may have a preferred typeface or background colour to improve readability.

A separate stylesheet is also used to control the appearance of printed pages. When you print a page from this website, the page navigation will not be included - leaving more space for the important information.

Changing text size

All the text in this website can be resized. This means that users can set their preferences to a text size that is comfortable for them.

Below are the steps for resizing text on the most common web browsers:

Microsoft Internet Explorer - versions 5 and 6

  • Select View menu

  • Select Fonts

  • Select your preferred text size

Netscape Navigator

  • Select Edit from the Menu Bar

  • Select Preferences

  • Select Appearance

  • Select Font. Then choose your preferred option

  • Colours and contrast

We have considered the needs of users who are colour-blind by selecting colour combinations with sufficient contrast between foreground and background.

You can however use your own preferred colour scheme. Instructions on how to change background and font colours for the most common web browsers are below:

Microsoft Internet Explorer - versions 5 and 6

Select Tools from the menu bar at the top of your window

From the options which appear, select Internet options

Click the General tab

Click the button marked Accessibility

To remove background and font colours, tick the checkbox labelled Ignore colours specified on web pages

Click on Colours

You can choose your own preferred colours for text, page background and links

Netscape Navigator

Select Edit from the Menu Bar

Select Preferences

Select Appearance

Select Colours

Change the colour of the text/background/links to your preferred colour

PDF documents

This website uses PDF (Adobe Acrobat) format for documents and forms that can be downloaded.

To read these documents, you will need software called Acrobat Reader. This software is freely available, and you can download a copy from the Adobe Acrobat website (External link) (External link).

The current version of Adobe Acrobat (Acrobat Reader 7) has a number of accessibility features. If you have an older version, you can upgrade by downloading the new version from the Adobe Acrobat website (External link) (External link).

All links to downloadable documents include the file size. This helps users to get an idea of how long it will take to download the document.

Pages which include PDF files for download carry the link to the Acrobat Reader download page on the Adobe website.

ALT attributes

All images in this site use ALT attributes. These are alternative text descriptions of the image.

ALT attributes are particularly important for partially sighted and blind users.

Links

This site contains a number of links to other websites, other pages within this site and to PDF documents.

We try to ensure that where we include a link, an appropriate description of where the link leads is used within the link itself. This means that when a screen reader is used to read out just the page links, the user will be given a clear description of where the link will take them.

We try to avoid phrases such as 'click here', which give no details on where the link leads to.

Tabbing

Users who have difficulties using a mouse can navigate through the site using the Tab key. We have designed the tab index so that it takes the user through the page links in a logical order - most important links first.

Tables

When designing tables on the website, we have considered the impact of the design on users employing screen reader technology.

All tables in this website are set up so that contents are read out in an efficient, logical and easy-to-understand way.

Frames

This site does not use frames.

Standards compliance

This site validates as XHTML 1.0 Transitional.

The stylesheets on this site are CSS 1.

More Accessibility information: