The New City of Ottawa Portal
Universal Access Design Standards

Policy

To ensure equal access to electronic and information technologies, the City of Ottawa has developed a set of Web page design standards in recognition of persons with disabilities.

Design Standards

These standards are influenced by those recommended by the W3C and Access Board. The Access Board is responsible for developing the standards outlined by the amended Rehabilitation Act of 1998. Universal design calls for appropriate use auxiliary aids and services where necessary to ensure communication.

The City of Ottawa has adopted the Design of HTML Pages to increase accessibility to users with disabilities as the primary guideline to meet the objectives of the Universal Access for State Design policy. These published guidelines are maintained by professionals trained in the area of assistive and information technology.

The Universal Access Design Standards are being integrated into the City of Ottawa portal and will continue to evolve as new technologies and opportunities emerge.

Every graphic image will have an "alt" tag and a short description that is intuitive to the user. If a graphic image is used as a navigation element, it will contain text description and direction that is intuitive to the user.
Every graphic image that uses an image map, alternative text of the hyperlink will be provided.
Photographs that contribute to the content of a page will include a long description or a "D" to denote an alternative description. A "return" link will be provided on the description page to return the user to the page of origin.
The Official Web Site of the City of Ottawa will have descriptive, intuitive text links and avoid the use of vague references such as "click," "here," "link," or "this."
An alternative form of access will be made available for online forms, such as an email address or phone number.
- Request Form for City of Ottawa Documentation in Multiple Format
The use of frames will be avoided since they cannot be read intelligently by screen readers, create navigation problems and are not supported by all browsers. The City of Ottawa cannot be held responsible for sites outside the network that utilize frames.
Tables will include textual information displayed in a linear form across the table, as well as cells will be named to aid as reference.
Background colors will be avoided since color schemes can create problems with legibility.
Multiple browser testing will be conducted on the current versions of Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer and Lynx.

Software Utilities

Adobe's PDF Converter allows you to convert regular PDF files to html. One of the required standards is providing, where applicable, an HTML alternative to PDF files.
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/access_onlinetools.html