Accessibility and Usability

International Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

Article 9. Accessibility
1. To enable persons with disabilities to live independently and participate fully in all aspects of life, States Parties shall take appropriate measures to ensure to persons with disabilities access, on an equal basis with others, to the physical environment, to transportation, to information and communications, including information and communications technologies and systems, and to other facilities and services open or provided to the public, both in urban and in rural areas [...]

This website has been realised with a accessibility- and usability-oriented approach in order to favour the access to contents in as simple and intuitive way.

There has been an effort to make aspects as perceptibility, intelligibility, operability and solidity prevail as recommended by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines elaborated by tge W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), and to implement Italian legislation on the subject.

The website uses XHTML 1.0 and CSS2 standards, separating  page contents and their style sheet. The layout is obtained through external style sheets: this ensures a better speed to lad pages and the possibility to customize the presentation syle and the dimension of the fonts. Thanks to these solutions, the website reaches full compatibility with most common browsers.

The following access keys are activable from every page in the website:

   * S - Skip navigation
   * 1 - Homepage
   * 2 - What's new?
   * 4 - General Search
   * 0 - Accessibility and Usability details (this page)

* = use the keys for rapid access supported by your browser

- Firefox Mozilla: ALT + SHIFT + KEY
- Opera: SHIFT + ESC + KEY
- Google Chrome: ALT + KEY
- Safari: CTRL + KEY
- Internet Explorer: ALT + KEY

The site provides several utilities: a text-only version of each page, breadcrumbs for easy browsing, alternative descriptions of multimedial contents, fonts enlargement  for better reading on the screen, links opening in the same window.

Other tools as the RSS Feeds, the Newsletter, and the "Share it" feature are oriented to contents sharing and spreading through a network composed by active subjects and tools for the promotion and the protection of human rights.

The editorial staff is comitted to mantain high the level of accessibility and usability.

By the end of July 2010 further intervention to improve the level of accesibility of the website are scheduled, in particular related to multimedial contents (audios, videos, pctures).

The website has been realised with the techical collaboration of  HCE l.t.d.. - Hypertext Cultural Experience, with headquarters in Abano Terme (Padua).

The translation of the website has been carried out by the staff of the Human Rights Centre of the University of Padua with the support of American Students doing their internships at the Centre