The City of Austell has developed consistent and strategic guidelines for the construction of online pages and services that appear as part of austell.org.  These guidelines are used to help ensure a positive user experience and easier accessibility by maintaining a consistent page layout, information architecture, and navigational structure.  In addition, the guidelines assist contributors to the site in developing a site that reflects the suggestions set forth in the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Accessibility Initiative. 

Guidelines for austell.org include:

• All images on this web site contain alternative text descriptions for the benefit of the user's utilizing assistive technologies.
   

• All navigational image maps contain alternate, text-based hyperlinks in a clearly defined area.
   

• All pages and documents contain appropriate meta-tag information to ensure useful search functions.
   

• All online forms are also available for request in other formats, such as hardcopy and can be faxed or e-mailed.
   

• Frames are never used on austell.org as they are not interpretable by assistive technologies such as screen readers and can often cause severe navigational breakdowns.

Use of Portable Document Format (.PDF) Documents

The City of Austell uses Adobe Acrobat to create .pdf files to provide online access to City documents in their original formatting.  In order to access these documents, and requires the free Acrobat Reader plug in from Adobe.