Accessibility Statement

The Florida Department of State is committed to making our web site accessible to all our users. Our websites are currently under review and redesign if necessary to make sure that they meet or exceed the requirements of Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.

Many of our web pages currently meet the Section 508 accessibility standards as well as the W3C's Web Content accessibility Guidelines priority 1 requirements. Furthermore, the Department of State continues to work on making all web pages accessible to its users.

Thank you for your patience through this redesign process. If you have any comments or suggestions for improvement, please contact the webmaster at [email protected].

Adobe Acrobat PDF Files Adobe Acrobat PDF Files

Many of the documents on the Florida Department of State website are in HTML or ASCII formats. These formats are generally accessible to people who use screen readers. We also have a large number of documents in PDF Format.

PDF format is used to preserve the content and layout of our hard copy publications. Publications in PDF can only be viewed and printed using the Adobe Acrobat Reader version 4.0 or higher. You can download and get help using the Acrobat Reader at the Adobe Systems, Inc. site. The downloadable Acrobat Reader software is available at NO CHARGE from Adobe.

People using screen-reading devices generally are unable to read documents directly in PDF format unless they have an accessibility plug-in installed on their system along with the Adobe Acrobat Reader. This plug-in is available at NO CHARGE from Adobe. Adobe also has online tools that will convert PDF files to HTML on request. To get the plug-in and latest news about Adobe's accessibility tools and services, visit the Adobe Downloads site.

PowerPoint PowerPoint Files and Word Files Word Files

You can view our online publications that are in PPT format if you have any version of PowerPoint installed on your computer. For those who don't have the software, the Microsoft Corporation offers a FREE PowerPoint file viewer. You can download and get help using the PowerPoint viewer at the Microsoft Viewers site listed below.

You can view publications in DOC format if you have Word version 6.0 or higher installed on your computer. Word documents can also be viewed with many other word processing software programs. Additionally, Microsoft offers a FREE Word file viewer that you can download listed above.

Microsoft offers FREE viewers for all of their Office applications. Please visit the Microsoft Viewers page and download the viewer that you require.

Style Sheets

Some of our web sites use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for page layout and text formatting. By using relative and adjustable font sizes, users are able to set the text size to better suit their needs. This feature is currently available on all Secretary of State and its divisions pages, but we are working to update existing pages. All new pages will have this feature.

Skip Links

To make it easier for people with screen readers to jump to the content, one of the first lines that a screen reader sees is the option to jump to the main content or this page. The access key to jump to the main content is "ALT" + "X".