The site has adopted a number of visual design standards to improve the user experience of the site and achieve consistent accessibility across the site:

• This site uses cascading style sheets for visual layout wherever possible.
• The site uses consistent navigation features on all pages ensuring that you can easily find your way around the site.
• This site uses only relative font sizes, compatible with the user-specified "text size" option in visual browsers, so that you can change the size of the font if you wish to.
• All images have alternative text descriptions.
• If your browser or browsing device does not support style sheets at all, the content of each page is still readable.

In general, we have tried to avoid the use of other proprietary publishing formats (for example, Shockwave Flash), browser-specific markup, and other technologies which can create accessibility barriers when carelessly used. We have focused on the use of "open" publishing standards, as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium.

Some occasional exceptions to this are made, in places where the content is inevitably inaccessible to blind users eg: our Online Mapping system.

Some large and complex documents use PDF (Adobe Acrobat) file format or Word format. Adobe Acrobat documents can be converted back to plain text "on the fly", using Adobe's Web-based conversion service.

Screen Resolution

Currently, our site is best viewed in 1024x768 screen resolution. However, the Council’s web team are currently undergoing a redevelopment of the website, due for completion by April 2006, that will ensure that the website can be viewed in 800x600 (and less).

Contacting Us

If you experience problems accessing any part of our site, please contact Customer Services and we will endeavour to provide content in a format that is accessible to you.