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Web Accessibility and Technology Integration
Gianluigi Mascia
The web is a set of several billion documents, called hypertext, which can contain images, sounds, videos, animations etc., but above all they contain links (hypertext connections) that are elements of the document and through a simple click can take us to another related document.
The webmaster is in charge of creating the web pages and should be the first to address the accessibility of the pages he creates: if a page is created without paying attention to the problems of the visually impaired, then it will be very difficult to fix the problem without having to completely redo it.
The relative ease in learning the basics of web languages drives many people to improvise as webmeisters without the necessary skills, creating a real mess, often unreadable to anyone.
To minimize these situations, the W3C has defined some recommendations to follow to make the web pages accessible, written under the name of Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).
Being simple recommendations, they are not mandatory to follow, and for this reason many governments have enacted laws.
The government of the United States of America, for example, has created Section 508, a set of rules that make electronic documents accessible to all citizens.
In Italy a law was approved on January 9th 2004, No 4, called the "Stanca Law", which establishes the criteria for the development of electronic documents, similar to the recommendations of the W3C and the american Section 508.
When it comes to browsers, which are programs that allow you to browse web pages, the question becomes more complex: there are so many programs, but almost none of them completly respect the standards in place, which results in the same page looking differently depending on the software used to see it.
In addition to the compliance of the standards, an aide to the accessibility of web pages comes from the integrated functions in browsers (especially zoom content) and in some cases the possibility to customize the software by the addition of specific tools.
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