Accessibility

Our aim

We are committed to ensuring digital accessibility for people with disabilities. We continue to make changes to improve the user experience for everyone and apply the relevant accessibility standards.

We include accessibility throughout our internal policies and have a plan to continually make our services more accessible to the Victorian community. For more information, please see our Access and Inclusion Action Plan.

Conformance

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) defines requirements for designers and developers to improve accessibility for people with disabilities. It defines three levels of conformance: Level A, Level AA, and Level AAA.

Wherever possible, we will aim to adhere to level AA of the WCAG 2.0 guidelines, which states that sites should be:

  • Perceivable - Information and user interface components must be presentable to users in ways they can perceive
  • Operable - User interface components and navigation must be operable
  • Understandable - Information and the operation of user interface must be understandable
  • Robust - Content must be robust enough that it can be interpreted reliably by a wide variety of user agents, including assistive technologies.

As part of our efforts to maintain WCAG 2.0 AA compliance, we use Monsido as an ongoing monitoring service.

Other accessibility considerations

We also offer other accessibility options:

  • Reading level - Where content is difficult to understand, we have provided Easy English alternatives.
  • Text-to-speech - We have included Readspeaker on this website, which can read out to you full pages or selections of text.

Limitations and alternatives

Despite our best efforts, there may be some limitations. Below is a description of known limitations and potential solutions. Please contact us if you observe an issue not listed below.

  • Older PDFs - Some older PDFs may not be accessible by screenreaders because they were generated with older software or are scanned copies of documents. Contact us for alternative formats.
  • Candidate statements and questionnaires - Candidate statements and questionnaires are provided as PDF documents. We make every effort to ensure they are appropriately tagged and accessible by screenreaders. Because candidate statements and questionnaires are generated by a form submission, the application can only output this submission as a PDF. Contact us for alternative formats.
  • How-to-vote cards - How-to-vote cards are provided by candidates, parties, individuals or organisations in various formats. In some cases, how-to-vote cards are scanned by the registrants and are images only. We guide people and organisations who may want to register how-to-vote cards on best practice but cannot enforce compliance. Contact the party, candidate or organisation if you need an alternative format.
  • Representation review submissions - Representation review submissions are provided as PDF documents. We make every effort to ensure they are appropriately tagged and accessible by screenreaders. Submissions may be generated by a form submission, a hard copy letter posted to us or an email. Some of these submissions must be scanned or redacted to protect the submitter's privacy before publishing on our website. Contact us for an alternative format.
  • Complex results tables - Some election results data tables may be long and complex because the number of candidates, voting centres and type of results require us to convey a large amount of data. We provide summaries and overviews of election-wide results, and complex data tables are not the only format available.
  • Browsers and operating systems - Some subdomains of this website may not be compatible with some browsers or operating systems:
    • VEC Disclosures is best viewed in Chrome
    • our Interactive Map may not be viewed on devices running iOS or MacOS older than the two most recent versions.

Feedback

We welcome your feedback on the accessibility of our website. If you have experienced any accessibility barriers while using any part of our website, please let us know:

Phone: 131 832
Email: webmaster@vec.vic.gov.au