FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 2, 2019
Contact: Susan Norton
Director
Department of Communications and Marketing
City of Fayetteville, Arkansas
479.575.8330
snorton@fayetteville-ar.gov
City of Fayetteville Website Adds New Accessibility Features
FAYETTEVILE, Ark. — The City of Fayetteville has added two new features to its website to provide greater accessibility for users who are English language learners, or who have low vision or limited ability to manipulate a computer mouse or keyboard.
The Google Translate feature is now available on most pages, enabling users to translate the page’s content into more than 100 languages in seconds. This feature appears as a Google drop-down menu in the lower right corner of each web page, from which users can select their preferred language.
The City has also added a UserWay accessibility widget to its site. This feature offers a variety of tools to make the site more navigable to users with low vision or difficulty using a mouse. The widget’s capabilities include changing the colors or contrast on the page, increasing text and cursor size, highlighting links, turning on keyboard navigation, and even reading the page’s content aloud. These tools can be accessed by clicking on the accessibility icon, which appears at the upper left corner of each page.
“As our society moves more and more toward digital channels for sharing information, it is vital that the City of Fayetteville make our web presence accessible to people of all abilities,” said Fayetteville Mayor Lioneld Jordan. “We strive to be ever more welcoming — to residents from other countries who may be just beginning to learn English, as well as to those who have disabilities that make it challenging to navigate the web without the proper tools to assist them. These web tools represent another step toward making information about our city’s services readily available to anyone in our community.”
These new web tools are part of the City’s Welcoming and Digital Inclusion Master Plans. The Digital Inclusion Plan, currently in development, seeks to close the “digital divide,” and help make high-speed Internet access available throughout the city and across all socio-economic levels.
The Welcoming Fayetteville Plan, adopted in 2018, lays out a strategy for making Fayetteville a more welcoming community for foreign-born residents. Part of the plan includes the creation of a virtual “hub” of information on the City’s website, specifically designed for foreign-born residents. The Welcoming Hub offers information about City services, as well as links to a host of other resources in the city and around the region of particular interest to new immigrants or foreign visitors. The Welcoming Hub can be found at www.fayetteville-ar.gov/welcome.
To learn more about the City of Fayetteville’s Welcoming Plan, visit www.fayettevillear.gov/welcoming. To view the status of the Digital Inclusion Plan, visit www.fayetteville.gov/digitalinclusion.
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