So, we (in Italy) have an
accessibility law, many public bodies show on
their homepages accessibility logos and a technical validator on Italian language
is also at disposal on the Web: everything is all right ? Not at all, let me explain why...
The Italian law on accessibility enacted on 2004 is known also as
Stanca law
from the name of the Minister that have promoted this important legislative initiative.
Stanca in italian means
tired and in effect after Italian media
has announced several times the enactment of this law we do not know anything
about its application, in particular we do not know anything about the technical rule
that should apply the general contents of the law (after many accessibility experts
have discussed on the Web about this strange delay and silence
a carbon copy of the WAI standards
have been published waiting for the definitive Italian rules).
An important
statistical survey
just published has shown how the enactment of
Stanca law
means nothing for the majority of public bodies web sites as they already have
several kinds of web barriers such as fixed fonts, frames, splash pages and so on.
All this in front of
another statistical data outlining the necessity of
information of the three million of disabled people living in Italy !
As a result the Web sites of
Municipality of Florence, Ministry of Justice, National Research Center, University of
Florence,
Tuscany Region do not satisfy the test of the W3consortium Validator,
moreover:
while some local public bodies are so championships of web inaccessibility to be
invisible to many special browsers (the
Municipality of Florence have a frame based site
without significant titles) also those public bodies that declare their own accessible degree
by means of accessibile logos are in effect carried out unproperly. Just to make few other examples
the local
public bodies of Arezzo show on their homepages the Bobby and A logos but
do not offer anymore the possibility to zoom the text that is a quite important
characteristic for disabled people.
The end of this overview on
Italian style for accessibility to remember the
name of the Italian validator:
Torquemada,
a sad name - in my opinion - for anyone
that know some of history or read the newspapers of current days.
In conclusion, I wanted to demonstrate how the Italian political involvment of
Public Bodies on Web accessibility issues is entirely oriented to show itself and on the media
as accessible but with no effective interest to be accessible from a technical point
ov view.
