Accessibility is of primary importance in the development of any IT application: Article 3 of the Italian Constitution establishes the right to equality, and in the ICT field this translates into ensuring access to IT and telematic services of the public administration and to public utility services for people with disabilities. The reference law is law 4/2004 (Stanca Law), which must be applied
to public economic bodies, private companies licensed to operate public services, regional municipal companies, public assistance and rehabilitation institutions, transport and telecommunications companies with majority public capital and contractors of IT services.
The universally followed guidelines for ensuring accessibility of a website are the ATAG 2.0 (Authoring Tools Accessibility Guidelines) by the W3C, an association founded in 1994 by Tim Berners Lee, the father of the web, with the aim of improving existing protocols and making the most of the potential of the Web. With specific reference to websites, the guidelines are the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines), which the Stanca Law is based upon.
In general, they indicate the characteristics that a website must present in order to be accessible; some of them: use clear, fluent and easily understandable text, and alternative text for every type of multimedia content; use titles and links that make sense even out of context; have a coherent and linear arrangement of content and graphical interface; be compatible with the largest possible number of browsers and software configurations; use standard colours with high mutual contrast.
Correct application of accessibility criteria must allow web pages to be read by software called screenreaders, specifically designed for visually impaired or blind people.
Regarding the Stanca regulation specifically, there are 22 requirements that websites must comply with, including: using at least version 4.01 of HTML or preferably version 1.0 of XHTML, in any case with a Strict DTD (Document Data Type Definition); not using frames; using CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) for graphical effects; providing a textual alternative for every non-textual object present on a page; ensuring that all informational elements and all functionalities are available even in the absence of the particular colour used to present them on the page; avoiding flashing or moving objects and writings whose flicker frequencies may trigger photosensitive epilepsy or concentration disturbances, or cause malfunction of the assistive technologies used; ensuring an effective contrast between text and background; the presentation and textual content of a page must be able to adapt to the size of the browser window used by the user without overlapping of present objects or loss of information that would render the content incomprehensible, even in case of resizing, enlargement or reduction of the display area or of characters relative to the default values of such parameters.
This makes clear how important accurate website design is, so that the application is compliant with the regulatory requirements and is usable in the public domain.
noze uses Plone for its native accessibility features and considers it particularly well-suited to applications destined for the Public Administration.