Accessibility means granting access to the information on a webpage regardless of limitations, either physical (visual, auditory or motor), technological (slow connection, outdated browser, slow display, etc) or other limitations in the user’s environment.
There are today millions of people with different types of disabilities. Browsing a website may prove very difficult for them. For this reason, when developing our website, we have taken steps to contribute to reducing accessibility barriers in an efficient way and to design a website ensuring access to as many users as possible.
To achieve this, we have followed the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines as established by WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative) and have applied standard formats recommended by W3C (World Wide Web Consortium).
In this sense, among others, we have adopted the following measures:
To make browsing more logical and intuitive, all the webpages in our site follow the same structure:
Keyboard shortcuts or access keys are combinations of keys granting direct access to the contents of a website without the need to use a mouse or a pointing device.
Use of keyboard shortcuts depends on the operating system and on the browser. Here are the most frequent:
N.B.: Netscape 4, Camino, Galeon, Konqueror, Omniweb, Safari (version 1.2 and prior), Opera Windows/Linux (version 7.0 and prior) do not support keyboard shortcuts.
You can browse observatoriumbp.net’s website using the following keyboard shortcuts:
The “title” attribute allows to include a description clearly describes the target of the link.
Additionally, where possible, links to JavaScript functions have been avoided.
This website uses Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), ensuring easy access and correct display of information in different environments.
observatoriumbp.net’s website is fully browsable for users accessing in text-only mode and for users having turned off the “Show images” option.
All the images in the site include a brief description ("alt", "longdesc" or "title" attributes).
The description text of images used solely for decorative purposes is left blank.
This site uses relative font sizes which can be customized by the user to make reading the contents easier.
To increase or decrease the font size, please follow these steps:
All the pages in the site have been validated as XHTML 1.0 Transitional and CSS 1.0. The Web Accessibility Test (TAW) has been applied to assess their accessibility, and they have been validated as conformant with double-A (AA) Level and some with triple-A (AAA) Level.
We have checked that the site is correctly displayed using different versions of most widely used browsers (Internet Explorer 5.5 and later, Mozilla, Opera...)
Applications intended for specific users under a user-password identification procedure are not accessible. This is so because of the complexity of converting these applications and because such users are already granted access to all the functionalities they may require.
Nevertheless, we are aware that compliance with such criteria may not always ensure easy access to the contents of our site. Please feel free to send in your suggestions to:
AA “Double-A” or AA Level means that all Priority 1 and Priority 2 checkpoints set by the World Accessibility Initiative (WAI) are satisfied.
AAA “Triple-A” or AAA Level means that all Priority 1, Priority 2, and Priority 3 checkpoints set by the World Accessibility Initiative (WAI) are satisfied.