Accessibility

Updated: 25 February 2011

Commonwealth departments and agencies are required by the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 to ensure that information and services are accessible by people with disabilities.

One of the objectives of the Australian Electoral Commission's (AEC) Disability Action Plan is to maximise the accessibility of the AEC's products and services for people with disability of all types, and to enable people with disability to effectively participate in the electoral process.

Accessing the website

The AEC website has been designed to provide easy navigation and accessible content. The AEC website meets the Government Online standards that relate to access for people with disabilities. The AEC website is the work of many authors and is a dynamic environment.

Therefore, there is always the possibility that accessibility difficulties may be encountered. There may be some data held in non-HTML formats. If there is data that you require and it is in a format that you cannot access, or if you experience any other accessibility difficulties, please advise the AEC Webmaster by emailing info@aec.gov.au or by writing to:

The Australian Electoral Commission
Communication Products & Services
PO Box 6172
KINGSTON, ACT 2604
Australia

The AEC website has been designed to meet accessibility guidelines as defined by the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0. These guidelines explain how to make Web content accessible to people with disabilities. This website follows the Priority One guidelines and where possible we aim to follow Priority Two and Three guidelines. In accordance with the Australian Government's Web Accessibility National Transition Strategy the AEC website is progressively being upgraded to achieve W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 compliance at the AA level.

Changing Your Font Size

If you find the text on our site to be too small to read, you can change the font size in your web browser settings.

Browsers

All information on this site is accessible by version 3 and above browsers. Best browsing experience can be had by using Internet Explorer 5.5 and above, Netscape 6 and above or Firefox 1.0 and above (PC and Macintosh).

Metadata

The Australian Government Locator Service (AGLS) metadata standard is a set of 19 descriptive elements which government departments and agencies can use to improve the visibility and accessibility of the services and information they provide over the Internet. The metadata on the AEC website complies with the AGLS metadata standards.

Accessible versions of publications

PDF Files

Many documents on the AEC site are provided in Portable Document Format (PDF). The Adobe website provides a number of tools and resources that can help people who use speech readers to read the content of PDF documents. These tools convert PDF documents to text readable by speech readers.

Other formats

Some publications on the AEC website are provided in accessible versions such as large print, rtf, csv and e-text. These versions are included in individual publications pages with other formats. For example, see the Your Vote is a Valuable Thing brochure.

AEC information and publications in other accessible formats, such as Braille and audio, can be requested by emailing info@aec.gov.au or by writing to:

The Australian Electoral Commission
Communication Products & Services
PO Box 6172
KINGSTON, ACT 2604
Australia

Contacting the AEC through the National Relay Service

Callers who are deaf or have a hearing/speech impairment can call through the National Relay Service:

  • TTY users can phone 133 677 then ask for 13 23 26
  • Speak and Listen (speech-to-speech relay) users can phone 1300 555 727 then ask for 13 23 26
  • Internet relay users can connect to the NRS and then ask for 13 23 26.

See Also