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Accessibility Statement

The Townsville City Council (TCC) website aims to be as inclusive as possible, especially with users who may use assistive technologies.

Additionally, our site has been:

  • Tested with various diagnostic and evaluation tools, and we are constantly striving to improve the way content is accessed.
  • Developed to display adequately on all commonly used browsers.
  • Designed to suit a minimum screen size of 600 by 800 pixels.
  • Designed in a fluid format to accommodate most screen sizes.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0 compliance

Wherever possible, we follow the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Accessibility Initiative Guidelines and TCC is in the process of formulating policies for our website in order to improve accessibility.

Where practical, the WCAG 1 have been addressed, however, as the WCAG 1 guidelines were written in 1998, some guidelines are no longer valid or applicable. TCC has incorporated a process of subjective assessment regarding which of the current Guidelines are still appropriate or applicable. When WCAG 2 is released in 2009, TCC will re-evaluate the site and implement the new Guidelines where ever possible.

PDF documents

Where possible, TCC has provided information on the website as HyperText Markup Language (HTML) based content or other equally accessible formats. In some cases, however, we do have a range of resources and documents that are provided most efficiently as a Portable Document Format (PDF) file.

PDF is the open standard for electronic document distribution worldwide. Adobe PDF is a universal file format that preserves all of the fonts, formatting, colours, and graphics of any source document, regardless of the application and platform used to create it. Adobe PDF files are compact and can be shared, viewed, navigated, and printed exactly as intended by anyone with the free Adobe Acrobat Software.

Adobe offers a number of resources to aid in accessing PDF documents including an online conversion of PDF documents to plain text or HTML documents, as well as providing free downloads of Adobe Reader.

Additionally our website features a software program called Browsealoud that is free to download via our website, and reads aloud HTML based text. Providing you have Adobe Version 8 or higher installed on your computer, Browsealoud will also read PDFs that have been set up to allow content copying and extraction and are contained on this website.

Maintaining documents in PDF format has been employed by TCC due to the nature of the documents, and the requirement for preserving their integrity.

Scanned Acrobat documents

For technical reasons and to meet some legal requirements, this website provides some PDF documents that cannot be provided in HTML or plain text, and subsequently are not accessible via screen reader software. These are usually scanned hard copy documents that have been submitted to TCC and may also contain a large number of images and diagrams. In most instances, hard copies of these documents are available from Council and this information is provided on relevant pages.

For more information on PDF document accessibility, please go to Adobe's website.

Browsealoud

Browsealoud is software that assists people with disabilities, visual impairments, low literacy and reading skills, and English as a second language, to read the content on this website.

Once the Browsealoud software is downloaded onto personal computers and activated, it works by speaking the words as a cursor moves over the selected text. Using this software provides opportunities for people to access information and to be more involved in Council decision making about Council services and programs.

By providing public access to Browsealoud on this website, TCC aims to provide a community service and to help meet Commonwealth Disability Discrimination Act legislation. The Browsealoud software is available as a free download and is only active for this website, the TCC Riverway and River Festival websites, and any other Browsealoud activated websites.

Please click on the link for more information about Browsealoud, and how to download and install this free software.

Languages

Our website promotes a link to Yahoo Babel Fish enabling this website to be interpreted into 13 different languages. This option can be found in the bottom left corner of each page.

Visual Design

This site uses cascading style sheets for visual layout, consistent hierarchy of headings, and for other formatting purposes. If your browser or browsing device does not support style sheets, the content of each page will still be readable.

Options to change the size of the font on this website can be found in the top right corner of each page.

Skip to Content

This site promotes the use of a Skip to Content option at the beginning of each page to support assistive and interpretive technologies to skip past HTML formatting information and proceed straight to actual page content.

This option can be found in the top right corner of each page.

Navigation

  • This website has a logical tab order to make it easy to navigate through the website using just the tab key.
  • Javascript can be turned off and users are still able to use the navigation menu as this is not dependent upon the use of Javascript.

Links to other sites

This website contains a number of links to other websites which will open in a new browser window. TCC is not responsible the accessibility standards of any third party websites that are not owned by TCC.

Making the website better

We hope that this site is accessible to you. If you encounter problems, require assistance accessing any content, or have suggestions on how we can improve this site please email the Web Development Team.