GovHK's Accessibility Features

The design of GovHK has taken into account the capabilities and limitations of the most popular web browsers as well as the needs of people with disabilities. Here you can learn more about the international guidelines on accessibility which GovHK has observed and the various accessibility features built into GovHK.

Accessibility Statement, Guidelines and Advice

GovHK adopts web accessibility design and conforms to the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) internationally recognised Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 to the level  AA (Double-A conformance). This means that it meets both basic and advanced accessibility standards and can be used by most people with special needs. GovHK also uses Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and style templates that standardise all the pages on the portal, thus enhancing accessibility.

Accessibility Considerations on GovHK

Ensuring a high level of accessibility is an ongoing process, and GovHK is continually reviewed for improvement. GovHK is fully accessible to all people with different levels of accessibility requirements. Consideration has been given to the following areas to ensure that GovHK is accessible to all:

Accessible by Popular Browsers and Operating Systems

The HTML 5 standard has been applied to the webpages on GovHK, and users can access them with any browser that complies with the standard. But exactly how a webpage is displayed differs between browsers, computers and operating systems. For the best viewing, we suggest that you use the latest version of Mozilla Firefox, Safari or Google Chrome.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Users who may be less adept at using mouse, such as the blind or those with neuromuscular impairments, may need to use the keyboard without a mouse to browse a website.

GovHK was designed in a way that you can use the keyboard exclusively to access all features and contents. For example, when you use the tab key, the cursor will move to all of the menus, hyperlinks or input boxes one by one in a logical order.

Some browsers also provide keyboard shortcuts that can make it easier to browse the website with your keyboard only. List of shortcuts for Firefox is available through the following link.

Compatibility with Screen Readers and Screen Magnifying Software

GovHK has been tested against the common screen readers and screen magnifying software used by the visually impaired in Hong Kong, including NonVisual Desktop Access (NVDA), Chinese JAWS and Windows Light. GovHK also works on screen magnifying software such as Zoomtext. More details about how GovHK's design addresses the needs of screen reader users are available through the following link.

Web Accessibility Conformance Statements

We are committed to ensuring that our website conforms to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 Level AA requirements to the maximum extent possible. However, due to the following reason(s), some webpages may not be able to incorporate all Level AA accessibility features at this point in time.

As our website contains considerable multi-media contents, it is not possible to incorporate all Level AA accessibility requirements in all of them. Nonetheless, the multi-media contents are so located as not to affect the accessibility of significant contents in our website.

As our website contains some archive materials that are not frequently used, not all Level AA accessibility features have been incorporated.

Should you have any enquiries or comments, please contact us by email at enquiry@1835500.gov.hk or by phone at 183 5500.