Federalist Debate

Declaration of accessibility

This website has been developed according to the principles of accessibility and in respect of the Legge 9 January 2004, n 4 (commonly known as “Legge Stanca”, G.U. n 13 of 17th January, 2004 ). Furthermore, it follows the accessibility guidelines given by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for the Web accessibility Initiative (WAI), according to the principle of universality. The reference document on how to make the website accessible is the W3C Recommendation, published on 5th May, 1999, that provides the guidelines for Web content ( WCAG 1.0 ).

Standard conformity

Pages have been realized in conformity with the following standards and specifications provided by the W3C:

• XHTML 1.0 DTD Strict language
• CSS (cascading style sheets that adds style attributes to the website)

Conformity can be verified through the apposite links placed at the bottom (footer) of the website.

Contrast

Beside the standard page visualization with dark characters on light background, a “high contrast” style sheet is available and can be activated through the link on the top right part of the page.

Navigation helps

At the top of every page of the website, you will always find the horizontal navigation menu that allows users to know their position on the website structure and the title of the page they are visiting. The structure is hyper textual and, with a simple click on the text of the navigation menu, it is possible to move back to the previous levels.

Texts

Inside the page, no markers have been used to define characteristics of the text or the background, while graphical effects have been realized with CSS style sheets. Furthermore pages have been organized so that they can be read even when style sheets are not supported or they have been disabled. The website does not use frames, flashing objects or writings that could impair the concentration or interfere with the use of helping technologies. An adequate level of contrast between text and background has been verified and the same level of functionality is assured in case of lack of the chosen colour. In the use of data tables, the site employs markers to identify headers of columns and rows with the TH tag instead of the TD tag for header cells. In case of paging tables, it has been verified that the table content is understandable even if read in a linear way.

Links

All links are realized through textual elements that are immediately recognizable because of the underlining. The TITLE attribute included in the code provides a description of the destination of the link.
Links open in the same window.

Images

Every non-textual item is given a textual alternative (ALT attribute) related to the function that the original item holds in the specific context.

Forms

On-line forms have been designed in order to associate labels to their controls, placing them in a way as to facilitate their filling out for people using helping technologies.

Different browsers check

Pages of this website have been checked with the following browsers:

• Firefox 3+
• Internet Explorer 7+
• Opera 9+
• Safari 3+

Font size of all texts can be increased or decreased through the specific browser command or the links (A+, A-) at the top right of the page.
This website does not apply a specified timeout interval function within which you can perform specific actions.

Accessibility is an ever-changing process

Accessibility improves over time and making a website accessible means to work in concrete ways to improve it, removing many of the obstacles along the path. For this specific reason the Centro Studi sul Federalismo web portal will develop constantly in order to increase its accessibility level.
Tools employed to check the website code do not automatically ensure usability and accessibility therefore a human control is always essential.
Notwithstanding the care in the making of this website and the various tests that have been carried out, it is not possible to rule out that some pages are, without us knowing it, still inaccessible to some group of users. In this case, we apologize for the inconvenience and we ask you to report any problem you experienced in order to let us fix it as soon as possible.
To report accessibility troubles, please refer to the information provided in the “Contacts” page.