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Accessibility

Melbourne City Mission is committed to making the content of our website accessible and easy to use for all audiences, regardless of your capability. This also includes those:

We strive to conform to the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and to comply with Level AA of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, Version 2.0. 

What does this mean?

Web accessibility is a term given to a type of web design that endeavours to make a site easy to access, regardless of the ability of the user, their limitations and capabilities, location, equipment or bandwidth. We believe that everyone has the right to access information, regardless of ability or disability. We have therefore built our website to adhere to best practice by following W3C standards, allowing you and users of all capabilities to access our site. There are a number of steps we have taken to address accessibility needs, some of which are detailed below:

Layout

The site uses Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to control all presentation and layout so that content is easily accessible and well structured via assistive devices.

Images

All content images used on our site contain alternative (ALT) text. This ALT text is displayed when the site is visited with images "off" and voiced by screen readers. The null (or empty) ALT attribute used for ‘non-functional or brand-type’ images should be ignored by screen readers.

Tables and forms

Forms and tables use accessibility features that enable them to be used with screen readers.

Screen zooming

Browser zooming is the best method to increase the size of the display of all elements on the website to have a larger view of the site:

PDF

There are a number of PDF documents available for download on our site. Adobe Acrobat Reader is required to read PDFs. Adobe Acrobat Reader can be downloaded free from the Adobe site, which also contains instructions for installing the software on your computer.

The Adobe website also contains a tool and instructions for converting PDFs into web pages online (http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/access_onlinetools.html). It works with most, but not all PDFs. Please note however, the conversion can take some minutes.

Coding

Our site has been built using code compliant with W3C standards for XHTML and CSS. Our site displays correctly in current browsers and using standards-compliant XHTML/CSS code means any future browsers will also display it correctly.

Screen reading software

People who have very low or no vision may use screen reading software. Screen reading software will read out content and navigation to the user. Users of screen reading software only use the keyboard, not the mouse, to navigate a website.

Our website is not only built to facilitate the use of screen readers but it is also built in an accessible format that will allow for a pleasant experience when using these tools. Users of screen readers will be able to find the information they are seeking on our site easily.

Below, we have listed some of the most popular software that is useful for assisting access to websites. Some are free and some are commercial but have free demonstrations.

Browser

This website is best viewed in Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 9, 10 or 11 or Mozilla Firefox.

Rich media content

All rich media content displayed on our website is provided with transcripts and/or subtitles. YouTube descriptions and captioning are used which can be accessed by clicking the 'CC' button within the video player. Alternatively, please click on ‘Transcripts’ to read the full transcript of the video.

Contact us

We are continually working to improve the quality and accessibility of our website. While every effort has been made to ensure that it is accessible to the widest number of users, if you experience any problems or have any questions regarding the accessibility of the this website, please don't hesitate to report any problems to us. 

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