The header contains the title of the page with the Medway council logo, accessibility links, the tool bar, which contains links that are useful for finding your way around the site and the breadcrumb trail. The breadcrumb trail is a navigation aid that shows you where you are on the website and allows you to quickly access upper levels of the site.
The left hand side column contains the council's main menu at the top and a 'key pages' menu, which consists of links to other parts of the site and important pages on the site. On the home page this column also contains Medway council contact details.
The middle column contains the main text area of the site and consists of the main content or information for the page.
The right hand side column has a 'Quick links' menu enabling users to get to popular areas of the site in one click. This column also contains 'Medway Spotlight' which has links to new pages, events and topical or current issue pages. At the bottom of this column is the related links menu that contains links to external sites that are of some relevance to the page content. These links may open in a new window
The footer, at the bottom of the page, contains navigation links similar to the header. If the page contains a lot of text then users don't have to scroll back to the top of the page to find these links.

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. New and updated Web content produced by our organisation will conform to W3C/WAI's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0, Conformance Level AA, by May 2006. Existing Web content produced by our organisation, and new, updated, and existing Web content provided for our site by third-parties, will conform to Conformance Level AA by August 2006.

Medway 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 by May 2006 on conformance to W3C/WAI's Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines 1.0, Conformance Level AA. Our home page will include links to this policy.

Medway Council will review this policy in the future to 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 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 this site define the following access keys:

Access key 0 - Skip Navigation
Access key 1 - Home page
Access key 2 - News
Access key 3 - Site map
Access key 4 - Search (advanced)
Access key 5 - Frequently Asked Questions
Access key 6 - Help
Access key 7 - Complaints
Access key 8 - Terms & conditions
Access key 9 - Feedback Form
Access key B - Business Section
Access key C - Your council Section
Access key D - Social care Section
Access key G - Online Services (inactive)
Access key J - Jobs
Access key L - Learning
Access key M - Members & Registration
Access key N - Environment
Access key P - Leisure
Access key S - Accessibility Information
Access key T - Text Only Version of site
Access key U - Housing Section
Access key X - Emergencies
Access key Y - Advice & Benefits (inactive)
Access key Z - A-Z of Council Services

Making the most of our site accessibility features

Please refer to our information below on specific accessibility features. For more help on how to get the best from your own software please consult the BBC's help pages for Windows, Apple MAC or Linux

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
Council theme menu
Main content links
Quick links
Right hand side links

High contrast page setting

This site has the option 'Change page contrast' at the top of the page, which increases the page contrast by switching the text to yellow and the background to black. This could help some people to better read the site's content. The page can easily be changed back to normal contrast by clicking again on the 'Change page contrast' link.

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 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.

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