Home Page
Site Help
About this
website
DigitalMaidstone has been rebuilt and improved using Immediacy
technology.
The main areas of the DigitalMaidstone website consist of:
- The header contains the title of the page with
the Digitalmaidstone logo, accessibility links, the tool bar, which
contains links that are useful for finding your way around the site
and the breadcrumb trail.
- The top navigation shows you the main themes
the website has to offer:
- Your Council – This section has everything you
need to know about your council, democracy, cabinet, committees,
MPs and councillors. The section also contains council
reports, documents, agendas and a calendar of meetings.
- News – This section contains all the news
releases, PR news, Public Relations contacts and acts as a portal
to other news websites
- Business – This section offers
information on Licensing, Procurement and Business Rates.
- Environment - Information on street cleaning,
refuse, recycling and climate change
- Have Your Say – Our community and
consultations area.
- Community - Information on community safety,
social inclusion, accessibility, funding and forums.
- Planning and Building Control - This section
offers information on Planning and Building control/Surveying.
The breadcrumb trail is a navigation aid that
shows you where you are on the website and allows you to quickly
access upper levels of the site.
- The left hand side column displays the
main sections and subsections.
- The footer, at the bottom of the page,
contains links to our online contact us forms, terms and conditions
and privacy statements.
Top
Popup Windows
DigitalMaidstone uses popups to display help information,
reports, external websites and some transactions.
Popup windows, or popups, are windows that appear automatically
without your permission. They vary in size but usually don't cover
the whole screen. Some popups open on top of the
current browser window, while others appear underneath
(popunders).
Browsers allow you to control both popups and popunders
through their Web Features Options panel. Popup blocking is turned
on by default, so you don't have to worry about enabling it to
prevent popups from appearing in some browsers.
When blocking a popup, an icon is displayed in the status bar
(Firefox) or the bottom right hand side of the bottom grey bar in
Internet Explorer. You can use this icon to add a web site you're
viewing to an exceptions list so that the site is allowed to
display popups.
Blocking popups may interfere with some web
sites: Some web sites, including some banking sites, use
popups for important features. Blocking all popups disables such
features. To allow specific web sites to use popups, while blocking
all others, you can add specific web sites to the list of allowed
sites.
Blocking popups doesn't always work:
Although browsers blocks most popups, some web sites may show
popups using uncovered methods, even when blocked.
Allowing popups from certain web sites in
Firefox: After you've enabled popup blocking, you can
still allow specific sites to display popups. Select . From the Web Features panel,
you can then add and remove sites for which you want to disable
popup blocking.
Allowing popups from certain websites in Internet
Explorer 5+: Go to 'Tools' and select 'Pop Up
Blocker'. You can chose to either allow all pop ups or only
allow pop ups from a particular website by selecting 'pop Up
Blocker Settings'.
Top
Popup Blocker Options (FireFox)
This section describes how to use the Firefox Popup Blocker. If
you're not already viewing it, open the Web Features Options by
following these steps:
- Select .
- Click on the Web Features category.
From there, you can do the following things:
- Block Popup Windows
- Allowed Sites: This is a list of sites that
you want to allow to display popups.
- Add Site: Click this to add a Web site to the
list.
- Remove Site: Click this to remove a Web site
from the list.
- Remove All Sites: Click this to remove all of
the web sites in the current list.
Top
Popup Blocker Options (Internet Explorer)
In internet Explorer:
When you visit a website that uses popups, Internet Explorer
will prompt you with a yellow bar at the top of the web page.
Click on the yellow bar and select either 'Temporarily allow
popups on this site' or 'Always allow popups on this site'.
If you see this bar on our website it is recommended that you
select always allow popups.
You can also change the popup blocker settings by going to
Tools on the Internet Explorer toolbar and selecting either
turn popup blocker on/off (it is recommended that you leave the
popup blocker turned on).
Select popup blocker settings and add the website to the allowed
list.
Top
Accessibility Help
The following sections describe some of the features that have
been incorporated into this website to aid accessibility.
Top
Accessibility Statement
Maidstone Borough Council is committed to ensuring accessibility
of its Website 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
wherever technically possible.
We operate an internal monitoring program. Vendors supplying
software used to develop our site are required to provide
information on conformance to W3C/WAI's Authoring Tool
Accessibility Guidelines 1.0, Conformance Level AA/AAA.
Top
Did you know?
Our website is speech enabled? We have launched a service
by Browsealoud which will allow you to have this site read out to
you. You can download the software and start using the
ScreenReader by clicking
here.
If you want to have any acrobat PDF (Portable Document Format)
documents read out for you, you will need to visit the
Adobe Accessibility
site for instructions on how to set up your Acrobat Reader.
Top
Opening a link in a new window or tab
Opening links in a new window or tab lets you explore links on
our site without losing your current page saving you from having to
use the back button on your browser.
You can open links in a new window by holding down 'Shift', or
in a new tab by holding down 'Control' as you click the link.
Alternatively, right-click (Apple-Click for Mac users) a link and
select ‘open in new window’ or ‘open in new tab’.
Top
Access keys
Our site uses access keys. Visit our Access Key page to find out more about
these.
Top
Making the
most of our site accessibility features
Using assistive technology
Assistive technologies are products used by people with
disabilities to help accomplish tasks that they cannot accomplish
otherwise or could not do easily otherwise. When used with
computers, assistive technologies are also referred to as adaptive
software.
Some assistive technologies rely on output of other user agents,
such as graphical desktop browsers, text browsers, voice browsers,
multimedia players and plug-ins. Assistive technology comes in many
different forms, some of these include;
- Alternative keyboards or switches
- Braille and refreshable Braille
- Screen magnifiers
- Sound notification
- Screen readers
- Speech recognition
- Scanning software
- Speech synthesis (speech output)
- Tabbing through structural elements
- Text browsers
- Voice browsers
As part of our accessibility statement we will test our pages
against as many types of assistive technologies as we can to make
the pages more accessible to you. If you do find that you are
unable to access any information using any assistive technology
then please contact us. If we
cannot make the information accessible to you using your assistive
technology, then we will try to find an alternative way for you to
access or be provided with the information.
Tab indexing
The site is designed to make tabbing through a page easy. The
order for tab indexing in a page is as follows:
- Accessibility links
- Global navigation
- Breadcrumb navigation
- Council theme menu
- Main content links
- Quick links
High contrast page setting
We provide a ‘text only’ version of the site for viewing at a
different contrast. Users can also remove or swap our style
sheets for their own.
Images
- All content images used in this site include descriptive ALT
attributes. Purely decorative graphics include null ALT
attributes.
- Complex images include LONGDESC attributes or inline
descriptions to explain the significance of each image to
non-visual readers.
- Where possible, graphic design has been rendered using style
sheets so that it is separate from the information
Visual design
- This site uses cascading style sheets for visual layout.
- This site uses only relative font sizes, compatible with the
user-specified "text size" option in visual browsers.
- If your browser or browsing device does not support stylesheets
at all, the content of each page is still readable.
- If you want to use your own stylesheet, you can.
Top
Standards compliance
- All Content Management System pages on our website conform to
AAA standard except where technical issues prevent it from doing
so.
- we use 'Inline Frames' which meet the accessibility guidelines
but are not perfect.
- Our E-Forms are in the process of meeting the AA
guidelines.
- Our GIS Interactive Maps fail Accessibility standards as it was
procured before the standards were set, however our GIS providers
are working on a AA/AAA compliant system.
- All Content Management System pages on the site should validate
as XHTML 1.0 Transitional.
- The stylesheets on this site are CSS 1.
Top
Technical Information
- A/AA/AAA are levels of conformance as defined by the Web
Accessibility Initiative.
- PHP was the programming language used to build our original
website
- Our website uses the Immediacy Content Management System
running on the Microsoft .NET framework and was written in C#, but
you are not really interested in that.
- Our website is basically a database of information running on
SQL.
- Our live server is MicroSoft Server 2003 running IIS.
- You can view our Internet
Service Standards here.
Top
DirectGov
The official UK Government website for
citizens
Easy access to the public services you use and the information
you need, delivered by the UK Government.