Accessibility of the Italian institutional web pages: a survey on the compliance of the Italian public administration web pages to the Stanca Act and its 22 technical requirements for web accessibility

TitleAccessibility of the Italian institutional web pages: a survey on the compliance of the Italian public administration web pages to the Stanca Act and its 22 technical requirements for web accessibility
Publication TypeJournal Article
Year of Publication2016
AuthorsGambino, Orazio, Pirrone, Roberto, and Di Giorgio, Fabrizio
JournalUniversal Access in the Information Society
Volume15
Issue2
Pagination305-312
ISBN Number1020901403
KeywordsItaly, law, Stanca Act, Web accessibility, Web content accessibility guidelines
AbstractAccessibility of the Italian public administration web pages is ruled by the Stanca Act and in particular the Decree of the Minister issued on July 8, 2005. In this paper, an objective test is performed on the official web pages of the Italian province and region chief towns to check their compliance to the 22 technical requirements defined by the Stanca Act. A sample of 976 web pages belonging to the websites of the Italian chief towns have been downloaded in the period October-December 2012. Such a data collection has been submitted to Achecker, the worldwide recognized syntax and accessibility validation service. Several accessibility and syntax errors have been found following the automatic analysis. Such errors have been classified, a statistic has been produced, and some graphs are included to offer an immediate view of the error distribution. Moreover, the most frequent errors are pointed out and explained in detail. Although the Stanca Act has been promulgated some years ago, and contains precise indications about updating a web page to be compliant to the 22 technical requirements, all the analyzed websites are not fully compliant to the law. Updating web pages to be compliant to the Stanca Act is a slow process and some grave errors are still present, both in terms of syntax and accessibility.
NotesStanca Act is an Italian law of 2004 which promotes the accessibility of information technology. It has also been applied to the Italian government websites. This study examined the web accessibility of the offical web pages of the Italian province and region chief towns according to the 22 technical requirements defined by the Stanca Act. A total number of 976 web pages were chosen and evaluated by Achechker, the worldwide recognized syntax and accessibility validation service. Errors detected included 18,338 errors in the html/xhtml code, 1,516 errors in the CSS code and 9,334 errors related to missed accessibility technical requirements. Results also indicated that a less number of pages did not imply a proportional decreasing of the errors. Reports regarding the study result listed in detail the number of errors versus accessibility requirements, the most frequent accessibility errors with the number each of them has been encountered and the mean errors for each Italian region. In general, the study suggested that the Italian institutional websites were not accessible.
URLhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10209-014-0381-0
DOI10.1007/s10209-014-0381-0