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General Information About Our Site

• Glossary and Shortened Forms
• Privacy
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• Disclaimer
• General Information About Our Site

Purpose of the Sydney Water web site

The Sydney Water Internet site is intended to provide a cost effective means to:

• Communicate to customers, suppliers and other stakeholders.
• Fulfil the core principles of protecting public health and the environment as well as being a successful business.
• Provide online services that meet the NSW State Government's commitment to Electronic Service Delivery (ESD).

The Internet site is also consistent with the NSW State Government's guidelines for website design, accessibility and metadata recording.

Reasonable efforts have been made to ensure that the information and advice provided on this website is in good faith on an 'as-is' basis derived from sources believed to be reliable and accurate.

• Accessibility
• Availability
• Cookies
• Statistical Information
• Classifying and grouping the information
• Links to and from the Sydney Water web site
• Supported Browsers
• Supported Screen Resolutions
• Required Plug-in Software
• Required Software to Play Movies
• Reading PDF Documents
• Changing Text Size

Accessibility

This website generally complies with Priority Level 1 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines from the World Wide Web Consoritum (W3C).

Availability

Sydney Water will endeavour to have the general functions of this web site fully available to you at all times (i.e: 24 hours per day, 7 days per week).

Specific applications operating within this website may have restrictions on availability due to operational or security constraints.

You should ensure that you have other means of undertaking urgent or time sensitive transactions and obtaining information, if for any reason this web site is unavailable.

Sydney Water may need to temporarily suspend the service for operational reasons (eg. for planned maintenance or upgrades), in which case we will give you as much advance notice as possible. Sydney Water will guarantee to restore the service as soon as possible after any suspension.

Sydney Water may need to alter code or access details or technical specifications associated with the service for operational reasons. Where we need to inform you about this, we will give you as much notice as is reasonably possible.

Cookies

Certain functions on this website require your browser to be set to allow the creation of "cookies" on your computer. Cookies are required for security reasons and to allow our systems to uniquely identify you and your computer.

Sydney Water does not use cookies to collect personal information. Personal and statistical information is only collected from this web site in accordance with our Privacy Policy.

Statistical Information

Statistical information is collected by Sydney Water in relation to the use of this web site, which allows us to improve the web site by understanding how our customers use the website. The information collected is described in our Privacy Policy.

Classifying and grouping the information

Sydney Water has classified information on the website into categories that our research has shown makes sense. However, because people think about information in different ways, this means that some subjects will appear in multiple places. We call this providing "multiple pathways" to the information you are seeking.

For example, if you want to pay your bill, you would discover it by several different pathways:

From the icon on the Home Page

From the menu item Your Account -> Pay Your Bill

From the Quick Services: drop down link to "Pay Your Bill"

From a search of the website

How do we keep track of all this? Behind the scenes we classify important website pages using "metadata". Metadata describes information. It is a system of classifying information - whether it's on websites, or in a library.

There is an international standard for metadata called Dublin Core. Australia has adapted the Dublin Core standard to produce its own Australian Government Locator Service (AGLS).

This metadata helps to provide more precision in what you find, with fewer results to look through. This is a big step forward from typical portal and search engine behaviour, which can overwhelm users with a vast quantity of low-value results.

Links to and from the Sydney Water web site

Permission to use the Sydney Water logo or any other image from this website, or to place a hypertext link or any page, image, or other item to this website should be sought by contacting the Sydney Water WebMaster.

Supported Browsers

on the Microsoft Windows platform:

• Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.x and higher
• Netscape Navigator Versions 6.x and higher

on the Macintosh platform:

• Internet Explorer Version 5.x and higher for OSX
• Netscape 6.x and higher

Problems may be experienced with early versions of Internet Explorer and Netscape that do not support web standards for Cascading Style Sheets. Upgrading to a later browser version should solve these problems.

Supported Screen Resolutions

The web site has been optimised for screen resolutions of 800 x 600 and higher.

Required Plug-in Software

This site makes use of Macromedia Flash technology as a Plug-in. To view Macromedia Flash content, you require the Macromedia Flash Player on your computer. You can download this plug-in software by clicking on the link below if you don't already have it installed.

Required Software to Play Movies

This site makes use of Microsoft Media file technology for movies. You can download the Media Player by clicking on the link below if you don't already have it installed.

This site makes use of Apple Quicktime file technology for movies. You can download Quicktime by clicking on the link below if you don't already have it installed.

QuickTime and the QuickTime Logo are trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. The Get QuickTime Badge is a trademark of Apple Computer Inc., used with permission.

Reading PDF Documents

On occasion, a web page link on our web site will lead you to an Adobe PDF document. Documents created in PDF (Portable Document Format) need the Adobe PDF Reader to be viewed. If this Reader is not already installed on your computer, you can get it, for free, by clicking on the image below.

The Adobe website provides online conversion tools to convert Adobe PDF files to plain text or HTML files. To access this service go to http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/access_onlinetools.html

Alternatively, it can be submitted as a MIME attachment to an e-mail message. All converted Adobe PDF documents will be sent back to the sender as MIME attachments. For plain text, mail the attached PDF to pdf2txt@adobe.com. For HTML, mail the attached PDF to pdf2html@adobe.com.

The text is too small for me to read - how can I change it?

On any page, click on the larger A to enlarge the text on the page and the menus.

Alternately, in Internet Explorer go to View > Text size and select Larger or Largest. Or, in Netscape go to View > Increase Font Size. You could also try changing the screen resolution.