You are at the official e-government services portal of the Sultanate of Oman. We are eager to ensure that all contents here such as web pages, web applications, text, images, forms, etc. are accessible to all of you. We have taken efforts to present the contents consistently in most commonly used web browsers to assure a smooth online experience for you.
We have considered key aspects of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) from the W3C consortium www.w3c.org and are making serious efforts to facilitate our web content being accessible to all people including those with disabilities.
While this applies to native content within this portal, however we cannot guarantee for it to work in other sites that are reachable through links from this portal.
We would like to hear from you, your user-experience in visiting this portal. Your remarks can help us improve this portal technically as well in terms content. You may also come across accidental errors or broken links and we request you to help us locate and rectify such mistakes that occur despite the best of our effort. Please use the Contact Us page to communicate with us and thank you for this.
You have assistive speech feature has been embedded into the portal without the need to add any additional client software makes it easier for visitors to hear contents of the portal instead of reading them. This technology will be very useful for visually-impaired users and even other users with difficulty in reading text online.
When the visual ‘speaker’ icon clicked, the text content in this section is read aloud as voice output. The accent is neutral and the pace is set normal so that users from various part of the world can understand the speech contents. User may have to adjust their speaker volume to suit their personal audio comfort.
The content can be downloaded as audio file in MP3 format in to the user’s computer by clicking on the ‘No Sound?’ option in the player. This enables users to download portal contents as audio and listen to it later from their PC or a portable media player. This player can be closed when not required and reduces to a small icon.
You can view our user-friendly videos to help you use government services. For example view this YouTube
To ensure that you can locate the information you need easily, the contents and features of this portal have been grouped based on themes and your profiles. Various components have been placed in similar location and in standard styles to increase familiarity so that navigation to specific part of this portal is easier for you.
The four major segments for reaching the relevant services are – Government, Citizens & Residents, Businesses and Visitors. You can access services most relevant to you by identifying your most suitable profile such as parent or student or employee, etc. Quick access to services access that you wish to request is available under ‘I want to. . .’ section. So there are many ways to reach the services that are offered to you for navigation.
Depending on which web browser you are using, this can be done in the following ways:
- Internet Explorer: select View > Text size
- Mozilla Firefox: select View > Zoom
- Opera: select View > Zoom
- Safari: select View > Make text [Bigger / Smaller / Normal Size]
- Alternatively you can change the resolution of your computer screen to make the entire screen display bigger or smaller. Depending on which sort of computer you are using, this can be done in the following ways:
- Microsoft Windows computer: select Start > Control Panel > Display > Settings
Apple Macintosh computer: select System Preferences > Displays > Resolution
You can enable the keyboard-based access controls in your operating system in order to access the portal using only keyboard-based short cut keys instead of using your mouse which some users prefer to.
The following are the settings and instructions for Microsoft Windows Operating System environment
- F1: Display the help file for the current programme.
- F4: Repeat the last action
- F11: View page content in Full Screen view.
- Ctrl + Z: Undo the last action
- Tab: to navigate between Web page elements.
- Alt + Tab: Switch between currently running programs.
- Windows key + D: Show your desktop.
- Windows key + E: Start Windows Explorer.
- Windows key + U: Open the ‘Ease of Access Center’, to change accessibility options on your computer.
- Ctrl + C: Copy selected text/graphics to the clipboard.
- Ctrl + V: Paste text/graphics from the clipboard.
- Ctrl + X: Cut selected text/graphics (a copy is saved to the clipboard).
- Ctrl + N: Open a New Window.
- Alt + letter: Activate the menu represented by a particular letter that is underlined in the menu bar. For example, you can access the Alt + F = Activate ‘File’ drop-down menu.
The following are the settings and instructions for APPLE MAC Operating System environment
- Command + Shift+?: Open Mac Help.
- Command + Z: Undo / Redo.
- Command + N: Create a new document in the front-most application / new window in a browser.
- Command + Q: Quit the front-most application.
- Option-Command + M: Minimize all windows of the active application to the Dock.
- Option-Command + C: Copy the style of the selected text.
- Command + V: Paste the Clipboard contents at the insertion point.
- Command + X: Remove the selection and store in the Clipboard.
- Control + F5: Move focus to the toolbar.
- F 10: Show all windows in selected application.
- F 11: Show Desktop Window.
- Command + M: Minimize window.
- Option-Command + M: Minimize all windows.
It is easy to navigate our website using your keyboard keys. This can be done using the following keys
- Arrow keys to scroll up or down the page
- Tab key to move between links
- Return or Enter key to select a link
- Backspace key to go back to the previous page
In case you cannot view the images, wherever possible, this portal provides alternative text components to graphical elements like logo, pictures, labels, etc. that make it easier for screen-reader software to describe the contents. This helps the blind people who use such software to get a fair idea about relative graphic web elements.
To help your readability of the contents of this portal, a safe web-palette of colours has been used to avoid use of colours as the only key differentiator of links and texts. The background and text colours have good contrast to read easily.
We assure that the contents of this portal have been designed to suit most of the commonly used web browsers. Appropriate attributes and tags have been used in the web-coding so as to ensure clear use of language components and smooth transformation of table elements in both old and new technical environments of the browsers. This portal has been tested with most common web browsers namely, Internet Explorer, Apple Safari and FireFox.
As this portal uses JavaScript codes, you are kindly requested to enable your browser setting to run this component in order to enjoy a smooth experience while browsing this portal.
Keeping the design of the portal device-independent has enabled the contents of this portal to read by any, user-agent or document reader. This means that users can interact with the portal through their preferred input or output device including command line inputs.
The forms section of this portal contains documents either in Microsoft™ Word format or Adobe™ PDF format as indicated by the icon. It also provides links to download the Reader Software, so visitors can install these free-readers and view the downloaded files.
This portal enables you to use only the keys of the keyboard to browse around the pages and forms avoiding the use of the mouse to navigate.
Press the tab key to work through the links on the page, hold down the shift key and press tab to go back through the links. When you select a link press Enter to go to the page. To go back a page press backspace button.
We encourage you to interact with us using popular social media channels such as Facebook , Twitter, and YouTube. Kindly participate in our discussions and help us to improve our services to you.
Some services forms have been designed completely as per accessibility guidelines such that they can be read using assistive technologies perfectly and filled-in. Working is progress to convert the other forms too to be in similar format.
We look forward to your comments and suggestions through our Contact Us page, in order to improve this portal’s accessibility for our visitors with disabilities as an ongoing enhancement. You can contact us anytime using the toll free telephone number 80077777.
