Accessibility help

Using the Site

This site can be navigated in several different ways:

  • The top section contains colour coded links to the main areas of Knowsley Council's website, broken up into easy to navigate sections such as 'Jobs at the council' to help you find the information you need as quickly as possible.  This top area of the site also has a search function so you can find what you need without clicking through the website's menus.  Services which the council provides are divided up alphabetically, which may make it even quicker to find the service you're looking for.
  • Underneath the main navigation is the 'You are here'  breadcrumb trail.  A breadcrumb trail is a bar which shows you which section of the site you are currently in and the menus which are clicked through to get to that page.  This is designed to help you know easily where you are in the website at all times.
  • On the home page, the left hand column contains links to the most frequently accessed pages of each area of the website.  Within content pages, the left hand column contains the navigation for that section of the website and expands depending on which colour coded area you are in.  Clicking on 'Residents', for example, will give you options for education, council tax and more- all the information you would expect for people living in the borough.
  • The middle column contains information specific to that page.  A news item will feature the text for the story, whereas the events section allows you to scroll through council led activities on a month to month basis.
  • The right side column contains links which are relevant to the page you are on.  Related areas of the website are highlighted and links to other appropriate websites may be provided.  Appropriate contact information will also appear in this column.
  • The footer, at the bottom of the page, contains fixed links to the website's terms and conditions, site statistics and copyright notice and is the same throughout the website. 

Accessibility Help

Images

  • All content images used in this site include descriptive alternative text to giving meaning to images.
  • Decorative graphics include null ALT attributes. Complex images include LONGDESC attributes, which explain the significance of each image to non-visual readers.

 

Visual Design

  • This site uses cascading style sheets (CSS 1) for visual layout.
  • This site uses relative font sizes, compatible with the user-specified "text size" option in visual browsers.
  • If your browser or browsing device does not support style sheets at all, the content of each page is still readable.

Changing text sizes, colour and contrast

The Knowsley Council website allows you to change the text size, colours and contrast used on the site without changing settings in your internet browser.  You can choose from three different text sizes and four different colour schemes to make the site as comfortable as possible for you to use.  This is useful if you have low vision, need larger fonts, or need high-contrast colours.

Choose text size

'Text size' and 'Change colour' are located at the top of each page on the website.  Simply click on your preferred text size and colour to change the site to suit you.

Change text colour

Viewing PDF documents

This site uses Portable Document Format  (Adobe Acrobat PDF) file format for the publication of large and complex documents, and for a number of applications forms.
Please note that Abode Acrobat documents can be converted back to plain text using Adobe's Web-based conversion service.

To view and print PDF files, you must have Adobe Acrobat Reader installed.  Download Acroboat  Reader.

Accessibility statement

Knowsley Council is committed to ensuring accessibility of its Web site for people with disabilities. New and updated Web content produced by our organisation will conform to W3C/WAI's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0, Conformance Level AAA.Other council run websites may not conform to W3C/WAI's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0, Conformance Level AAA. Knowsley Council's aim is to bring such websites up to AAA conformance levels in the future. We will continually review this policy in the future to consider updating it to an advanced version of W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines once available.

Standards Compliance

Most pages on this site comply with all priority 1, 2 and 3 guidelines of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. This site validates as XHTML 1.0 Transitional.The stylesheets on this site are CSS 1.

Use of Assistive Technologies

Assistive technologies are products used by people with disabilities to help accomplish web tasks that they cannot accomplish otherwise or could not do easily.

Some assistive technologies rely on output of other user agents, such as text browsers, voice browsers, multimedia players and plug-ins. Assistive technology comes in many different forms, some of these include:

  • Alternative keyboards
  • Braille
  • Screen magnifiers
  • Screen readers
  • Speech recognition
  • Scanning software
  • Tabbing through structural elements
  • Text browsers
  • Voice browsers

All our newly developed web pages are tested against as many types of assistive technologies as we can to make the pages more accessible. If you are unable to access any information using any assistive technology then please contact us and we will try to find an alternative way for you to access or be provided with the information.