Website Accessibility
The City of Sydney website is built to provide access for a widening variety of newer technologies and web browsers, including assistive technologies for the Internet. For most visitors, our site is now easier to use, quicker to access, and more streamlined for updates and modifications.
We are continuing to improve the site to comply with web standards outlined by the World Wide Web Consortium and the Australian Government Information Management Office.
Our site now uses Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and XHTML for most page layout and design details. While there may still be tables and spacer GIFs in a few spots which are often used on websites to set up and control page structure, the City of Sydney is systematically working to remove these potential barriers to accessibility. These steps will make City of Sydney content ready for deployment via a number of web enabled devices (such as PDA's and cell phones) in the coming years.
The change to CSS-driven layout and formatting makes this site more accessible to most web browsers and specialized browsing environments used by the visually or physically impaired. By removing most font, color and margin rules from the markup, and listing our style rules in CSS files that are cached (saved on to your computer) when a visitor arrives at our site our pages appear more quickly and consistently on web browsing devices, and future design changes can be applied to our site's pages quickly.
To help move web technologies forward - toward accessibility, additional security, and functionality - City of Sydney supports the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Standards Initiative, which encourages users to upgrade their browsers. Older browsers like Netscape 4.x or Internet Explorer 5.x weren't built to fully support CSS. Consequently, our site's presentation on older browsers may look different, although our content can still be accessed from older commercial browsers.
Visitors who continue to use older browsers will see a much simpler presentation, one that offers the full content in a stripped-down design. We recognize that imperfections are bound to appear, even though we've done our best to ensure our site renders as consistently as possible.
PDF Accessibility
A number of documents on the City of Sydney website are only available in Portable Document Format (PDF). Though the City of Sydney web site attempts to only list materials that are available in HTML or other equally accessible formats, sometimes resources are identified that can only be provided efficiently in PDF format and are too important to ignore. In these cases where a resource is only available in PDF, a link will be provided identifying resources that aid in accessing PDF files.
There is ongoing research and development on PDF file accessibility. Periodically we will re-evaluate the efficacy of including PDF documents and your feedback on the ease of accessing these documents will be an important factor, as will any new product enhancements or research results, in our decision regarding the inclusion of PDF documents.
Converting PDF to a More Accessible Format
Since PDF documents may not be readily accessible to screen readers and may not be formatted for visually impaired users, the following tools can be used to convert PDF documents into plain text or plain HTML documents. This service is provided by Adobe.
Online Conversion:
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/access_onlinetools.html
Email Conversion:
For converting offline documents, you can send your PDF as an email attachment and a converted version of the document will be posted back to you.
HTML version:
pdf2html@adobe.com.
TEXT version:
pdf2txt@adobe.com
An Adobe Acrobat access plug-in is also available from: http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/5efe.htm
Contact Us
If you continue to have difficulties accessing our content, please contact us using this form or at webmaster@cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au
