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 1024 by 768 pixels.
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 1.0 have been addressed, and endeavours, where possible, to meet the requirements of WCAG 2.0. TCC has incorporated a process of subjective assessment regarding which of the current Guidelines are still appropriate or applicable.
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.
Where documents are above a file size of 400kB, the file size will accompany the link to that file. All documents exceeding 1MB in size will be accompanied by a disclaimer. Large files above 1MB are recommended for download only by a broadband connection. All documents can be viewed in person by contacting council. Where practical, links to PDF documents will also be accompanied by a file type icon.
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.
Disabilty and Languages
Townsville City Council provides links to several free third party programs for people with a disability or if English is a second language.
Browsealoud is a software program that assists people with disabilities, visual impairments, low literacy and English as a second language, to access web content.
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.
Navigation
This website has a logical tab order to make it easy to navigate through the website using just the tab key.
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.