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Website Accessibility Policy

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Purpose of Policy

Although not required by regulation or law at this time, Sutter County acknowledges its obligation to provide reasonable access to visitors who use assistive technology or who may have other needs, which may be served through design principles outlined in the Federal Section 508 guidelines.

Policy Contents

 The following sections of our Website Accessibility Policy explain these aspects:

  1. Accessibility Statement
  2. Accessibility Steps Taken
  3. More About Accessibility

A.  Accessibility Statement

Sutter County Government is committed to ensuring that it's website is accessible to the public. The County's website periodically undergoes review and redesign as necessary to ensure that the principles of the Section 508 Amendments of the Rehabilitation Act of 1998 are at least acknowledged and pursued so that the website best serves our visitors using assistive technology. Although only mandated for federal agencies, the County feels that following Section 508 standards and presenting an accessible website best serves the public.

In 1998, Congress amended the Rehabilitation Act to require Federal agencies to make their electronic and information technology accessible to people with disabilities. Inaccessible technology interferes with an individual's ability to obtain and use information quickly and easily. Section 508 was enacted to eliminate barriers in information technology, to make available new opportunities for people with disabilities, and to encourage development of technologies that will help achieve these goals. The law applies to all Federal agencies when they develop, procure, maintain, or use electronic and information technology. Under Section 508 (29 U.S.C. 794d), agencies must give disabled employees and members of the public access to information that is comparable to the access available to others.

Some files are posted as Adobe Acrobat PDF (Portable Document Format) files. Users with visual disabilities can download free software from Adobe which will make reading PDF files easier by visiting the following link: Adobe Acrobat Reader Accessibility Page.

B.  Accessibility Steps Taken

We work on making the Sutter County Website user-friendly and as accessible as possible. See below for details of specific steps that we take to improve your browsing experience.

  • Links
  • Images
  • Visual Design

Links

  • Many links have title attributes which describe the link in greater detail, unless the text of the link already fully describes the target (such as the headline of an article).
  • Whenever possible, links are written to make sense out of context. Many browsers (such as JAWS, Home Page Reader, Lynx, and Opera) can extract the list of links on a page and allow the user to browse the list, separately form the page.
  • Link text is rarely duplicated; two links with the same link text point to the same address
  • Few links open in new windows other than PDF documents and links to external websites

Images

  • Content images used in the home page and content pages include descriptive ALT attributes. Purely decorative graphics include an empty ALT attribute.

Visual Design

  • The current site uses a mix of cascading style sheets and HTML tables for visual layout. Our next website redesign will eliminate the use of HTML tables for layout in favor of a more accessible-friendly CSS based layout. HTML tables mainly will be reserved for data presentation. Until then, HTML tables used for layout purposes contain a summary attribute with a value indicating that the table is used for layout or formatting.
  • If your browser or browsing device does not support stylesheets at all, the content of each page is still readable

Acronyms and abbreviations

When determined necessary by our content providers, this site makes use of many acronyms and abbreviations. We try to define each instance with the appropriate HTML tag.

C.  More About Accessibility

For further information and to learn more about the regulations governing the accessibility of Federal electronic information products, visit the Section 508 pages listed below:

Users who encounter difficulty during their visit to this website are requested to contact the webmaster describing the nature of the problem and the section where the difficulty was encountered. If you have any comments or suggestions for improvement, please use our contact form or email the Webmaster webmaster@co.sutter.ca.us.