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About This Site

Accessibility statement
About the new website design 2011
Better Connected 2011 assessment and ranking
Credits and contacts
For information on website visitors and availability visit our website statistics page.

Accessibility statement

A website for all people, a website for Haringey

Our site is for all people. It has been designed with our target users in mind and Haringey people have been consulted at every stage of the design process. We have created a website that is designed to be accessible for the widest possible audience – regardless of ability. This includes providing access for people with disabilities who may have special needs. Our new site does not use tables for layout, which helps to make it more accessible.

Help on using our website.

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How do people with disabilities use the internet

People with disabilities, such as a visual impairment, may use assistive technologies to use the internet. Assistive technologies are products used by people with disabilities to help accomplish tasks that they cannot do easily otherwise.

Assistive technology comes in many different forms, some of these include:

Speech synthesis (speech output)
Alternative keyboards or switches
Braille and refreshable Braille
Screen magnifiers
Sound notification
Screen readers
Speech recognition
Text browsers
Voice browsers

The Haringey website has been built so that people using the technologies listed above can access and use the information available.

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W3C – validation service

This site is built using code compliant with World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards for XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets. W3C is the governing authority on web development standards and practices. The site displays correctly with current browsers, and using standard XHTML code means that any future browsers will also display this website correctly.

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Web Accessibility Initiative – Double A conformance

This website seeks to conforms to the Double-A level of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 as a minimum, whilst aiming for Triple-A conformance. The Accessibility Guidelines explain how to make Web content accessible to people with disabilities. Conformance to these Guidelines helps to make the Web more accessible to users with disabilities and benefits all users.

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Free text to speech software/screen readers

We do not offer text to speech facilities on this website, however there are a number of free text to speech (or screen reading) tools you may wish to use, including the following:

NVDA - Non Visual Desktop Access (external link) (Windows)
Thunder Speech Reader - the Talking Software (external link) (Windows)
Orca (external link) (Linux)
Emacspeak - The Complete Audio Desktop (external link) (Linux)

Note: The list is an indication of what is available not a full list. There are also paid for solutions available you may prefer - search online for more options.

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Accessible Videos

We now display a number of videos on our website. These are hosted on our council YouTube account (external link) and embedded on our pages using an accessible media player developed for us by Nomensa (external link). The player ensures compliance with W3C guidelines and unlike most Flash controlled players the Nomensa player is keyboard accessible via html based controls and opens the door to the visually impaired using assistive technologies.

Where possible we have added in captions and a transcript to help deaf and visually impaired site visitors.

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Exceptions

There may be a few pages that do not conform to all the guidelines, particularly as we move from WCAG 1.0 to WCAG 2.0. Known issues include:

Colour contrast - in some cases there is not sufficient colour contrast between text and background which may cause problems for some users with visual impairments.
E-forms - there are a number of issues related to the e-form software we are using including incorrect page titles, tables used for layout, headings not marked up properly, no customisation of session time and no indication of current position within the form.
Videos without subtitles, captions and audio descriptions - even though we have an accessible media player on the site, some of the videos we have been asked to broadcast do not have any subtitles or captions.
Acronyms and abbreviations - these should be marked up using appropriate tags - a limitation of our content management system we are seeking to address.

Whilst every effort is made to ensure the whole site conforms, with so many pages and contributors, this is an ongoing process. If you have any problem accessing any information on the site, please email us at content@haringey.gov.uk and we will endeavour to provide the information in a suitable format.

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Better Connected 2011 assessment and ranking

This website was rated 3 out of 4 stars overall in the Society of IT Managers (SOCITM) Better Connected 2011 assessment. The Better Connected website ranking system denotes performance by council websites based on an annual assessment of their usefulness and usability and is carried out by a team of expert reviewers commissioned by SOCITM. It is based on a structured questionnaire (120 questions in 2011) that test website performance against a range of specified criteria that define the usefulness and usability of the website.