It is important to South Gippsland Hospital that our content is available to every user. WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) 2.0 and W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) recommendations were followed to ensure accessibility for all. Please contact us if you have any accessibility questions or recommendations, since we strive to always improve the user experience for visitors.

Navigation

A hidden ‘skip to content’ link has been added to enable users with screen readers to go directly to the content area of the page, bypassing the navigation.

Fonts

Some users may find that increasing the text size within their browser will make reading pages easier.

To change the text size

On most browsers hold down the Ctrl or Command key and at the same time, push the + or – key to increase or reduce the font respectively. Some browsers will increase the size of the whole website but this can be changed in the browser settings.

Firefox – click the View menu, then select Text Size and then choose whether you would like to increase the size (increase) or decrease the size (decrease).

Internet Explorer – click the View menu, then select Text Size and then choose larger or largest (the default is medium). Alternatively, hold down the Ctrl key and scroll the mouse wheel (if you have one).

Please note that when the font is set to largest, the headings within some sections will wrap and may become difficult to read.

Links

Most links are text based. When an image is used for linking, then it is specified with an Alt (alternate) tag.
Wording of links are contextual where possible (for example, instead of ‘more’ or ‘click here’, this site will use ‘more about Dr Jones’ or ‘read about our equal opportunity policy’). This makes navigation easier for users browsing with screen readers.

Images

Only meaningful images have been supplied with text descriptions. This will assist screen readers and users who browse the internet with image display turned off.

Standard compliance

HTML and XHTML adhere to W3C standards. This site conforms to W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.00 level A.

Screen Readers

Mac OS X (v10.5 and newer) by Apple includes a fully featured screen reader known as VoiceOver. It provides a wide variety of requested feature enhancements. These include a new high-speed, high-quality voice, plug-and-play support for refreshable Braille displays, international language support, an interactive built-in tutorial, and the NumPad Commander, which makes navigation easier for new Mac owners who previously used Windows screen readers.

Microsoft Windows XP or Vista, includes a very basic screen reader that will read parts of the screen out to you. However, due to a number of limitations with this feature, it is not particularly useful for a person who is totally blind. In this case you would still require a dedicated screen reader to use the computer system.

Common Screen Readers

The following are free:

• VoiceOver for Mac OS X, free (built-in to the operating system). More information at Voiceover
• Non Visual Desktop Access (NVDA) for Windows, free. Available from NVDA

Please visit Vision Australia for more information.

Conversion tools
The usage of PDFs has been avoided where possible. There are free PDF converters available:

PDF to Word software

PDF to text software