Our commitment and approach to maintaining an accessible website
Kildare County Council is committed to providing information and services that are fully accessible to all. The site is designed in accordance with the W3C WAI Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and Irish National Disability Authority Guidelines for Web Accessibility, it conforms to most priority 1, 2 and 3 checkpoints. A list of outstanding issues is set out below. 'Design for All' is the best approach to accessibility;
Visual design
The site is designed in accordance with priority 1, 2, and 3 guidelines of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and the Irish National Disability Authority Guidelines for Web Accessibility. For example, the website uses cascading style sheets for visual layout. This ensures that content is perfectly linearised and improves performance on a wide range of browsers and other user agents. If your browser or browsing device does not support stylesheets at all, the content of each page is still readable.
We use headings tags to communicate this content in a structured way.
All font sizes are relative, and can be increased using user-specified "text size" option in visual browsers.
Documents on this site
Some of the information on this website is available in PDF format to provide for easier reading and printing offline. The PDF format is not always accessible (except in the case of PDF documents created with the latest Adobe Acrobat software). Certain documents were created before this software was available. PDF documents on this site require Adobe Acrobat Reader which can be downloaded here: Adobe Acrobat Reader
As part of our ongoing work to make this site accessible to all our users Press Releases are now in HTML format rather than word/pdf documents.
Site Structure
Our Primary 'Links' to all Kildare County Council services and information and are located along the top bar, these are consistent throughout the site. There is also a 'skip link' available allowing users to skip to content. The search facility is to the right of primary links and s on every page of the website.
Below these links are 'breadcrumbs' which indicate where the user is on the site.
On the left hand side of each page offers links to the section you are within.
You can also navigate the site via the Site Map, or A-Z or search the site for the information you are looking for.
Known issues
Pages are designed to validate as DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional. There are a number of remaining validation errors, but work is ongoing to fix these.
Most of the documents on the website are in MS Word and PDF format and work is ongoing throughout the organisation to make this information available eventually in properly structured MS word, PDF and HTML formats so that is accessible to as wide an audience as possible.
Maintaining accessibility
Kildare County Council is committed to maintaining and monitoring the accessibility of this website. The site is audited at regular intervals and tested to see if it meets requirements.
Some accessibility features of this website
Responsive Web Design
The design of this website will respond to the width of your screen, so that you can easily find and read what you’re looking for. the design will also respond to the size of the text, so you can increase the size as much as you need to.
WAI-aria (Web accessibility initiative accessible rich internet applications) landmark roles
This website’s code will identify the different areas of each webpage (banner, search, navigation, and content information) for users with assistive technology.
How to send feedback on this website's accessibility
We welcome all feedback on the accessibility of this website.
You may email webteam@kildarecoco.ie or contact our Accessibility Officer Michael Hurley, telephone 045 980707 or email accessofficer@kildarecoco.ie
