SITE HELP
The City of Harrisburg’s web site is designed for use with the latest versions of Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator. If you currently use older versions of these browsers (including Internet Explorer 4.x or earlier, Netscape Navigator 4.x or earlier and AOL 5 and earlier), you may experience technical difficulties with certain areas of the site. While these technical difficulties may manifest themselves in “unsightly” ways, they do not impact the availability of the information on the web site.
Treat yourself, and your computer, to a free upgrade to your favorite browser, and enjoy the Internet to its fullest potential. We recommend the latest versions of Internet Explorer 6, Netscape 7, or Mozilla 1.4.
Parts of HarrisburgPA.gov require the use of browser “plug-ins” to assist with viewing content provided on the web site. PDF files require the free Adobe Acrobat Reader. In the future, online animations may require use of the Macromedia Flash Plug-In.
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Internet Explorer 6
Netscape 7.1
Mozilla 1.4
Flash Plug-in
Adobe Acrobat Reader
If you need any further assistance with using our web site, please contact our webmaster@cityofhbg.com.
Accessibility Help
The Tri-County Association for the Blind provided a thorough review of the website with JAWS, an advanced and popular screen reader, by FreedomScientific. During user testing we discovered an issue effecting JAWS. This issue may affect other assistive technologies so you may, or may not, experience problems while visiting HarrisburgPA.gov.
How does this problem effect users of JAWS? JAWS’ built-in “virtual cursor” fails to buffer the page correctly resulting in a loss of navigational links on the page. User testing and JAWS technical support provided two work arounds to the problem.
The first work around is simple and quickly provides access to the navigational links using the Links List.
- In JAWS, press Insert-F7.
A second work around for JAWS is also available, allowing the use of the virtual cursor as intended.
- In JAWS, press Insert-Z to turn off the virtual cursor.
- Press Insert-F5 to reformat the page.
- Press Insert-Z to turn on virtual cursor.
FreedomScientific is aware of this issue with the virtual cursor and a fix to JAWS is in the works, tentatively scheduled for release late December 2002.
Other screen readers may include similar features. The bug in JAWS may also effect these other screen readers.
To provide some further background into the accessibility features of HarrisburgPA.gov the following information is provided.
The development of HarrisburgPA.gov includes a behind-the-scenes infrastructure to provide the best possible accessibility experience. This is accomplished by using numerous best practices with close attention paid to W3C and Federal accessibility guidelines.
A low vision or non-sighted user visiting HarrisburgPA.gov will find that the body, or content, of the page is always presented first. This is followed by the navigational links. This is an intentional design, after all you visit a web page for its information not the menus of links—though they are helpful in finding more information.
Coupled with this design is a separation of presentation and content. The page itself is limited to content and structural markup elements. The presentation of a page for a fully sighted user is provided by a separate style sheet. The immediate benefit is the ease of navigation provided to users of assistive technologies; content is presented first followed by a natural grouping and order of links. The aforementioned separation of content and presentation eliminates the use of nested tables elements to anchor content. In fact, HarrisburgPA.gov uses tables only for the presentation of data in a row and column format—the original intention of the HTML table element. Another benefit is that one HTML page can suit the output needs of several mediums including, paper, braille, aural, and even mobile devices. These output options elimate the need for separate “printer-friendly” pages, reducing the amount of time spent in developing a website that is accessible to all users.
We hope that you enjoy visiting HarrisburgPA.gov and find the accessibility features helpful.
