Accessibility
Ryedale District Council aims to ensure that all users of
its services, including those who may have a disability, or
prefer to use another language, can obtain full access to Council
information and advice.
Assistance for hearing-impaired users of
Ryedale services
Are you a textphone or Mincom user?
Please call 0207 490 8913 and then select
option 2 (Ryedale District Council), this will start a
'conversation' with an available contact centre operator who will
deal with your call.
The Council’s Reception area is fitted with an induction loop
and staff are available with British SignLanguage training.
Language Line
Ryedale residents for whom English is not their first
language can now benefit from a new service provided by
Ryedale District Council.
Using a service called Language Line, the Council now provides
access to professional, qualified telephone interpreters in 150
languages.
Ryedale District Council staff will use language
identification cards to identify a customer’s preferred language,
before contacting Language Line and briefing the interpreter who
will speak to customers direct.
Please note that automated translations of this website are
available in a variety of languages by following the "Translate"
link at the top of the page. These translations are provided by
Google or AltaVista's Babelfish.
Website Accessibility Options
The following settings are available on the Ryedale
District Council website to provide better accessibility for
users who require it.
These settings will only be available for the duration of
this visit to our website. If you would like to save the
settings for future visits please click on the remember settings
button at the bottom of this web page.
|
This option will leave a cookie on your computer allowing it
to remember each accessibility option you have chosen, so we
can make sure you get the same settings next time you visit
us.
Cookies are not dangerous, they do not contain or spread
viruses and do not allow us to access your PC in anyway (see
Help
page). |
This is a Speech-enabled Website
Please click on the logo below to learn more about this
feature.
Website Accessibility Statement
Accessibility
The Ryedale District Council website has been designed to
be both attractive and accessible to use, providing all users with
access to the site, whatever their ability.
We've listed below many of the "best practice" techniques to
make our website more usable and accessible to all.
Viewing the website
The website has been designed to provide a site that is simple
and user friendly. With a sensible and simple site navigation
and meaningful page names, all information should be accessible
with only a few clicks of the mouse. We've also tested the site in
the following web-browsers:
- MS IE 6.0
- Mozilla Firefox 2.x
- Safari 1.x
Our website includes:
A "Useful Features" top bar: accessible from every page. The
top bar gives users access to certain key features of the website
which include:
- Skip Navigation: allows visitors using screen readers to jump
straight to the main page content.
- Text Only: a version of the site presented with
high-contrast yellow text on a black background.
Side Navigation: an easy to use menu system that expands to
display any sub-pages of the current page. When a page is selected,
it moves to the top of the menu.
Main content area: the main part of the website where you can
read the information you have selected
Footer: containing address and contact information on all pages.
The home page footer also includes a generic feedback email address
that encourages users to comment on the site.
W3C Compliance
The website has been coded in keeping
with the guidelines issued by W3C/WAI. Our aim is to ensure that
our website is compliant to a minimum of the "WAI - AA" standard.
We also aim to ensure that our websites have compliant CSS and is
XHTML 1.0 correct. We are working to deliver these standards.
Automated Accessibility Checkers
Automated
accessibility checks have been applied against this site during the
development process. The site has been designed
with strict adherence to the best practice guidelines issueed by
W3C/WAI. However, automated compliance tools can
only catch errors based upon an interpretation of these rules,
which are not context specific. For example, they can not
evaluate the content of the page, such as whether the "Alt" or
title text is appropriate, or advising adding title phrases to
links. If you have a query regarding the results returned by
such tools, please address them to the Council using the email
address below, and we will be happy to assist you.
Tab indexing
We have included tab indexing on
our website which makes tabbing through our site easier. It
also helps users who access the website using only a
keyboard.
This is the tab order of our website
- Skip Navigation
- Text Only
- A-Z of Services
- Contact Us
- Accessibility
- Help
- Site Map
- A-Z Service Alphabetical Index
- Main Menu
- Other Navigation
- Main Content
Assistive Technology
Disabled users can use assistive technology to help them use
our website. We have tested our website with both text-only
browsers and screen magnifiers.
Please let us know if you have any problems using these tools or
would like to recommend ways we can improve access to our
website. We will do our best to make the improvements you
request.
Visual design
To help you view our website we have:
- Used colours with a maximum contrast between the background and
foreground
- Given all meaningful images and graphics an Alt-text name which
describes what you would be looking at if the image was
displayed
- Chosen the standard blue colour for all active hyperlinks
- Used style sheets so you can change the size of the text using
your browser's text size controls.
Mapping (GIS) Service
Every effort has been made to meet the needs of computer users
with visual impairment or other conditions that limit
accessibility. Due to the high graphical nature of this part of
the website, the geographical information cannot always be
presented in an accessible format.
PDF Accessibility
This site uses a large number of PDF documents to supplement the
many thousands of pages of content. PDF documents can be read
using Adobe Acrobat Reader and the later versions of the Reader
(Acrobat Reader 7 onwards) contain many capabilities specifically
designed to make it easier for people with disabilities to read PDF
files, regardless of whether the files have been optimised for
accessibility.
More information on accessibility features of Adobe Acrobat
Reader is available from the Adobe
Website.
Adobe Acrobat Reader is a free download, available from the link
below or by clicking on the image.
Useful Links