Waterford City Council is committed to providing information and services that are fully accessible to all patrons, regardless of ability. We are subject to "The Disability Act 2005", requiring Local Authorities to provide people with disability, full and equal access to all their services.
If you have any difficulties or questions regarding this website or our accessibility efforts, we would be delighted to get your feedback. Please contact Conan Power at cpower@waterfordcity.ie or call 051-849746.
Web Accessibility
This web site is designed in accordance with the W3C accessibility AAA standard (priority 1, 2 & 3 guidelines of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines).
We try to ensure that our web site remains W3C compliant but there may be instances where pages are not fully W3C AAA compliant.
In the future, on such pages, we will include a "Text Only version" of each page so users with screen readers and magnifiers will be better served.
Style sheets (CSS) are in use to control layout and presentation. The user can increase and decrease the font size by using their browser. Pages and images are optimised to ensure fast downloading.
We provide alternative means of finding information such as an A-Z Guide. This site is continually monitored to ensure it keeps to this Accessibility Statement.
History of our web site and its accessibility
At the beginning of 2006, our web site was not at all accessible and did not conform to any web standards.
We employed the accessibility experts, iQContent, to audit our web site and to provide training to our developers as to the best way forward.
Following training for our web staff, we fully redesigned the site using CSS and valid HTML. Areas of the site are still currently being re-designed and will be re-launched over the coming months.
We also plan on incorporating a speech element to the site where users can have the content of the web site read out to them, using their own screen reader. This will work to a limited extent at present. We hope to shortly incorporate a program such as Browse Aloud on our web site
At present we consider the site to be compliant with Level 2 (AA) of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines as set down by the World Wide Web Consortium with many areas actually AAA compliant.
Our Web development staff have been trained on the use of plain English in an online environment and are, at present, endeavoring to bring this attitude and way of writing to the staff at large.
At present our Library Catalogue is not as accessible as we would like it to be. We are aware of its shortcomings in this regard and are working with the software vendors in order to better serve our users.
We are also endeavoring to ensure that the other online services we provide are the most accessible on the market.
If you would like more information on the Library Catalogue or to register for the service, please contact Katherine Collins on 051-309900.
Waterford City Council established an Access Team in 2006. The role of the Access Team is to ensure cross departmental representation on matters of accessibility.
The functions of the team are to undertake work internally in City Council to ensure compliance with the Disability Act 2005 and the DEHLG Sectoral plan. The team also works to ensure Best practice in terms of the provision of Quality Customer Services, Information and Communication and Technology systems and access to the built environment.
The Access Team have also been instrumental in work to achieve Best Practice awards from the O2 Ability Awards in 2005, 2006 and again in 2007. The team will also work with the National Disability Authority to achieve the Excellence through Accessibility award.
In the future we hope to increase the level and quality of our service and information for our disabled users.
These include, but are not limited to :
- Setting up accessible workstations in each of our three main lobby areas in order for users to ease access to our main online services.
- Create Podcasts of our important documents and announcements so the spoken version can be downloaded by sight impaired users.
- Create drafts of all our main important documents in both Plain English and Large Print.
- We also hope to create a "Text Only version" of each non accessible page so users with screen readers and magnifiers will be better served.
- Our accessibility statement [ 
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- Our accessibility statement (large print) [ 41k ]
If you have any difficulties regarding this website or our accessibility efforts, we would be delighted to get your feedback. Please contact Conan Power at cpower@waterfordcity.ie or call 051-849746.
Additionally, we can provide most documentation available on this website in the following formats :
- Large print
- Audio - on tape or CD
- Braille
- Plain English
These document formats make take a number of days to prepare and make available.