We strive to ensure content is available to the widest possible audience. By adhering to guidelines for accessible web design, we acknowledge the diversity of communication methods, available technologies and abilities of web users in the community.

Parts of our online services – such as our database, RecordSearch – are complicated and may cause difficulties, but in most cases we provide alternative ways to access information.

This website is XHTML-compliant and makes full use of cascading style sheets (CSS). It will look best on recent browsers (Internet Explorer 6, Firefox, etc) which are developed with these standards in mind, but will display adequately on all commonly-used browsers.

The site is mainly text-based, so we have not offered a text-only version of the site. The site can be read by braille readers and other assistive technologies.

The site is designed for a screen resolution of 1024 x 768 but will scale to both higher and lower screen resolutions.

We are committed to providing information in alternate formats when requested or required. This includes transcripts for audio and video files. If a transcript is not provided on the site, please ask for it.

The technical and content standards we work to are:

• XHTML 1.0 Transitional
• CSS 2.0
• the Australian Government Web Publishing Guide
• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 published by the W3C

Some of our information in the site is provided as PDF. You need Acrobat Reader to view PDFs. You can download Acrobat Reader for free from Adobe.

Reports comprising sets of files are provided in archives (.zip) format and can be opened with a program like Winzip, PKUNZIP or NetZip. This type of software is often available online as freeware or shareware.

Some documents on this website were created using Microsoft Word. These are provided as Word 6.0 documents.

The National Archives website complies with the Australian Government Locator Service (AGLS) Metadata Standard. The standard is a set of 19 descriptive elements that are used to improve the visibility and accessibility of services and information over the internet.

This standard was developed by the National Archives and issued as Australian Standard AS 5044 by Standards Australia in December 2002.

We would like to hear from you if you have had trouble with using the site or if you have helpful suggestions to make the site more accessible. Please be as specific as possible when you contact us and let us know:

• your operating system, for example 'Windows XP'
• your browser type and version, for example 'Internet Explorer 5.5' 
• the nature of the issue
• the page on which the issue occurred

To contact us, use our feedback form or write to: