WEB Accessibility
The World Wide Web, with its ability to be a "24x7 source of information" is a remarkable reality in our society. Unfortunately, many Web pages are published without any consideration about an important question: "is this Web page accessible for everyone?"
Currently most Web sites have accessibility barriers that make difficult or impossible for many people with disabilities to use and access the Web. Using keyboards and mouse, hearing video and audio multimedia files, browsing through some intrusive Web pages (i.e. Web pages with pop-ups, advertisements, etc.) could appear as a normal activity for "non-disabled'' people, but, on the other hand, it appears as a not simple task for users with some type of disability.
There are
no universally accepted categorizations of disability, but they can be
classified into the following main categories: Visual
disabilities, that include blindness, low vision and color blindness; Hearing
Impairments, that include deafness or a mild hearing impairment; Physical disabilities,
that include motor disabilities; Speech disabilities,
that include difficulty in producing speech that is recognizable by software
for voice recognition; Cognitive disabilities,
that include, for example, dyslexia, attention deficit disorder,
intellectual and memory impairments.
Web Content Accessibility guidelines by W3C provide
several suggestions for Web designers on how to author Web pages in order to
make them accessible to everyone. In this context, we are working on the use
of edge services as an efficient and general solution to promote
accessibility and breaking down the digital barriers.
To this aim, we are working to
PAN, a set of edge services designed to improve
Web accessibility, developed and deployed on top
of a programmable intermediary framework named
SISI.
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Contacts
Address: Dipartimento di Informatica ed Applicazioni "R. M. Capocelli"
Università degli Studi di Salerno
Via Ponte don Melillo - 84084 Fisciano, Salerno (Italy).
email: iaccarino[@]dia[.]unisa[.]it (without [] antispam)
