Accessibility

The software underlying the SIVA Portal was written in 2003. Great effort was devoted to ensure top–level accessibility – compatibly with the technology available at that time – for people having motor or visual impairments.

At the time the Portal was designed, a specific Italian law concerning accessibility didn’t exist yet, so the reference point was represented by the international guidelines then available (WCAG 1.0 – recommended by the EC within the frame of the eEurope initiative) and, at national level, by the following Ministerial Circular letters:

Circular Letter March 13th, 2001 “Guidelines for the Organization, Usability and Accessibility of public administrations websites“
Circular letter of the National Authority for ICT in the Public Administration (CNIPA), September 6th, 2001 “Criteria and tools to improve the accessibility of websites and computer–based applications for persons with disability“

The tool used for automatic testing of web pages accessibility was “Bobby WatchFire“ (no longer available since February 2008).

In 2012 the Portal will be renovated, in order to improve its technical performance and also to fully comply with the new regulations regarding accessibility (Law 9th January 2004, n. 4) and to the new international guidelines (WCAG 2.0) proposed thereafter. Indeed, although the Portal has a good level of accessibility on the whole, not all its pages pass the formal validating tests of the HTML code (carried out through the most recent tools (http://validator.w3.org of W3C); as a consequence, it’s likely that users with earlier–generation screen readers or assistive devices encounter some problems during netsurfing.

More in detail:

The web pages were realized through HTML 4.01 transitional language; style sheets (CSS) were used, in order to separate the graphic layout from contents;
all pages display both a vertical menu allowing to enter the different thematic areas of the Portal, and a horizontal menu as well, showing information sheets;
navigation help is given by “breadcrumbs“ (not clickable) that indicate the exact user position within the website; the Tab index function allows moving from one section to another using the keyboard;
as far as the website structure is concerned, no frames were used; a liquid layout was chosen, allowing contents to fit the size of any browser window;
images, for example those representing products, are provided with an alternative text; within pages, optimal contrast between text in the foreground and the background has been chosen (except for orange titles over white background);
no flashing objects or signs causing epileptic or concentration problems are present;
documents attached to the records of the Portal databases – whether displayable on–line or downloadable – the standard Portable Data Format (PDF) was adopted, unless they lose significance outside their native format (ex. Spreadsheets XLS; multimedia presentation PPT); The accessibility of PDF documents is certainly strongly influenced by the way they are compiled in the original format, before being converted into a PDF. In order to grant a good accessibility level for SIVA Portal documents, collaboration is required by all Portal’s contributors. For this purpose a document containing some guidelines was created, thus improving accessibility of documents realized through MS Word. A given formatting model is also available for MS Word format.

In case of any problem regarding accessibility or data retrieval within the SIVA Portal database, please contact us at portale@siva.it.