Help

Barking and Dagenham

Our website looks quite different from most other council websites. This is because we have tried to make it easy for people with disabilities to use the site, and also to make it easy to read the pages regardless of whether you have a conventional personal computer (PC).

In order to view these pages at their best on a PC, we advise doing the following:

Maximise your browser so that it fills the screen. If your browser window is too small, some of the text and pictures may overlap. It has to be very small though for this to happen
Use your browser options to set the text size that suits you best

We no longer offer a separate 'text-only' version of the website because we believe it is no longer needed. The site responds well to using the Accessibility options of most browsers and computers, and also should perform well with screen readers. We have implemented Access keys, including the ability to skip the navigation bar. See the Accessibility web page for more details.

Older web browsers

We have tried to make the site easy to view with older web browsers such as Netscape 4.x. With these, the 3 column layout is reduced to a single column.

Printing

When you print a page from this website you will only print out the content that is important. All the navigation links and the search box will be left out, saving you paper. You will also notice that the content fits the width of the paper.

Hand held computers

We have tested the website with the Pocket PC version of windows, and the 3-column layout is broken up so that the middle column (the main content of the page) displays first, followed by the right-hand column (usually contact information) and then the left-hand navigation column.

Standard categories

We have implemented the new standard way of categorising council services on websites so that in the future it will be possible to carry out multiple searches on more than 1 website. This will be possible if all councils describe their services in the same way.

Technical information

It is our intention that all pages validate as XHTML 1.0 transitional. Some sections of the website are provided by external vendors and so will take longer to achieve this. We have abandoned tables completely for layout purposes, retaining them only for presentation of tabular data. Such tables are being re-structured with appropriate header information for screen readers.

Is this website 'transactional'?

The simple answer is yes, because there are a range of transactions you can carry out with us by using the website. These include paying bills, checking on your housing repairs or applications, and reserving or renewing your library books. You can also make applications for many council services online.

Over the coming months many more transactions will be added to the site as we move forward with our e-Government agenda. Please also note that the Barking and Dagenham website was listed as one of the top local authority websites within the United Kingdom by SocITM for this and other work.

Are Adobe PDF files accessible?

In most cases they are not, and there are many of them available for download on the website. We are embarking on a project to offer accessible versions of downloadable documents and forms but this will take many months to complete. In the meantime we are taking steps to ensure that all new documents and forms are provided in variety of formats to aid accessibility.

Is this website 'e-GMS compliant'?

Implementation work is currently underway to ensure that this site has correct metadata on each page. Metadata is simply abstract information about each page, and can be viewed in the head of each page source view. All metadata being implemented is fully compliant with e-Government metadata standards (e-GMS) and Dublin Core.