About Accessibility
Greater Shepparton City Council is committed to ensuring that this website is accessible to everyone. If you have any questions or suggestions regarding the accessibility of this site, please contact us, as we are continually striving to improve the experience for all visitors.
The Greater Shepparton website has been built to conform to W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) guidelines for accessibility. In addition, extra accessibility features of this website are listed below.Change Font Size
Using current web technologies for Cascading Stylesheets (CSS), you now have the ability to switch styles while surfing the Greater Shepparton website. This does not alter the toolbar, only the body of the page.
You can use the "Accessibility Options" toolbar to the right to increase and decrease the general body font size. Also, if you are running a standards-compliant browser, you can also switch your styles using the browser interface - generally FONTS or STYLES under the VIEW menu. Modern standards-compliant browsers allow you to easily increase the font sizing from the view menu, the keyboard or even the mouse by simply selecting the command to increase or decrease font size. The Opera browser, an excellent accessibilty browser, actually scales the entire webpage - fonts, images and all.
Printing Options
Clean printing
Using our "Print this page" feature from the bottom of most content pages allows users to print pages specifically designed for hardcopy and legibility. A new window will be opened with the current page content contained within. The navigation menus and other design elements will be removed, the text will wrap to the page margins, and the font face is updated ready for printing. This will be supported in all browsers that accept stylesheets.
Print the screen version
If you wish to print the web page exactly as it appears on the screen, do not select the print option in the toolbar, but rather select Print directly from the browser's File menu. It may be necessary to turn on background images if you want to exactly replicate the on-screen layout. Remember web graphics are generally poorly suited to printing.
Browser Recommendations
While Greater Shepparton City Council does its best to support users with older browsers, the reality is that some of our online/electronic resoures require the use of modern standards-compliant browsers which have both JavaScript and cookies enabled. Running modern standards-compliant browsers allows the user to access resources, materials and the World Wide Web as it was originally intended.
There are now several excellent browsers to choose from apart from Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator and many of these alternate browsers are designed to run on older class Pentiums or Macs. For more information on standards compliant browsers visit The Web Standards Project or the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
For users with visual impairments, accessibility issues or even users who wear glasses for reading, we highly recommend the use of the Opera web browser. It has some excellent accessibility features, the most notable of which is the ability to easily scale both the text and graphics for entire web pages. As of version 8.0, Opera is now available for free download. A free alternative for Windows is the Maxthon web browser, which also features the same full-page scaling options, as well as tabbed browsing, eliminating the need to have many browser windows open while web surfing. However Maxthon requires Internet Explorer to also be installed. We also recommend and support the use of Internet Explorer, to which all of our web pages conform.
Free downloads of the following browsers are available at these URLs:
- for Windows
- Mozilla Firefox (A very rich browser. Fully standards compliant.)
- Opera (An excellent alternative, with great accessibility features including full page scaling. Works with all online resources. Fast.)
- Maxthon (A free alternative to Internet explorer, expanding on many of IE features, including pop-up stopper and tabbed browsing.)
- Internet Explorer (Very solid browser. Works with all online resources. Considered standard. Limited CSS.)
- for Macintosh
- Mozilla Firefox (A very rich browser. Fully standards compliant.)
- Safari (A very solid browser and fast. The new standard Macintosh browser replacing IE but only for Macintosh OS X.)
- Opera (An excellent alternative, with great accessibility features including full page scaling. Works with all online resources. Fast.)
- Camino (Mozilla flavour for the Macintosh.)
- Internet Explorer (Link removed - Lacking in features, and Microsoft are no longer supporting or developing it.)
This is by no means an exhaustive list. There are lots of other browsers out there, but some may take massaging to get them to work with our many websites, so they are not recommended for those with limited computer skills or patience.
Assistive technology
Visually impaired visitors can use screen reader technology to improve their experience in this website. For example, visitors can navigate using headings alone. Visitors using recent versions of screen readers can navigate using the following keystrokes:
- H to cycle forwards through the headings
- Shift + H to cycle backwards through the headings
- 1 to navigate to the next level 1 heading (or a number between 1 and 6 to navigate to the next heading on this level)
- Shift + 1 to navigate to the previous level 1 heading (or a number between 1 and 6 to navigate to the previous heading on this level)
- INSERT + F6 to provide a list of all headings
The web browser, Opera, has excellent keyboard navigation that is invaluable to visitors with motor difficulties. In Opera, the following keys can be used to navigate headings:
- S to cycle forwards through the headings
- W to cycle backwards through the headings