Accessibility

eCAT Platform wishes to provide universal access to its contents and services as well as a satisfactory user experience.

Thus, during the development process, current legislation has been applied. This demands the application of WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative) guidelines, which are designed to enable physically handicapped or people subject to technological barriers to access information.

Accessibility guidelines for web pages (WCAG 1.0) define three levels of conformance. At present, eCAT Platform conforms to level A, which guarantees basic requirements for people with disabilities to access the platform while working to reach level AA which will guarantee a number of improvements so that all users may use the platform smoothly.

Accessibility guidelines

At present, accessibility guidelines fulfilled by the platform are the following:

• Use of XHTML and CSS code, to create standard documents and a clean structure:
  • Use of standard grammars validated by W3C.
  • Data tables have been rebuild to make them accessible to voice browsers, with a proper identification of rows and columns.
  • Heading items (H1,H2,...) are used to describe documents structure.
  • Lists and items are correctly identified.
• Proper page display without using styles.
• Text size and colours can be modified with the navigation tools so as to adapt them to people with visual disabilities. There is still an issue with Internet Explorer on changing text size which will be solved in following platform versions.
• Alternative description of images and non text items, to enable display readers for blind or visually impaired people read the document properly.
• The use of JavaScript (Fold-outs, chips, etc) is an option, not a requirement. An alternative is always provided to the users with JavaScript disabled or old versions without DOM support.
• Some components, such as the social network or the portal sitemap, use Java. An alternative is provided for users who don't have Java installed or who have it disabled.
• Background and foreground colors on images containing text have a sufficient contrast so that people having some color distinction impairment may see them correctly, also for people using black and white displays.

How to browse without using the mouse?

For all users who wish to use eCAT Platform with the keyboard, we recommend disabling JAVA and Javascript, so tools built up for this end will appear.

Future

Platform's aim is reaching WAI-AA level, for which W3C Priority 1 and 2 checkpoints must be satisfied. When reaching this accessibility level, the platform will also offer the following advantages:

• HTML documents improved structure
• Improvements on the access to forms (linking tags and controls specifically).