IGD’s website and accessibility

The IGD portal was conceived and engineered in accordance with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommendations for web accessibility.

We regularly test our website with regard to accessibility and usability in order to maximize the effectiveness of our online communications and to continuously improve our users’ navigation experience.

 

Why is accessibility important?

The accessibility of our website is the product of a number of techniques relating to planning, engineering and maintenance which seek to make the content as easy to access as possible by potentially everyone, while eliminating obstacles which interfere with its usability due to both objective and subjective conditions.

There can be vast differences, for example, in the software and browsers used, in screen resolution, connection speed, as well as in the user’s eyesight, motor and  perceptual skills, including in function of the level of fatigue or background noise.

 

Which aspects of accessibility did IGD focus on

A design which pays attention to differences.

The ability to adapt to the needs of each user is important: for this reason we found a way to control the formal aspects – the display of content – through the use of Cascading Style Sheets or CSS which we combined with a design capable of adapting to each users’ settings so that each page appears correctly and information is not lost.

Browser

IGD’s website was tested with the most common browsers, in order to obtain a consistent and precise look under all conditions.  We used proportional measurements in order to determine the size of the different characters, so that each user can size the text based on his/her preferences.

Navigation tools:

• skip: this short-cut makes it possible to skip repeating navigation devices (such as, for example, the menus), in order to access page content directly;
• “access keys“: use of the ALT (+shift for Firefox users) or CTRL (for Apple users) key simultaneously with other keys (if you use Internet Explorer you will need to hit ENTER to activate the command):

• • Key 1: direct access to the page’s main content;
  • Key C: editing of website search engine;
  • Key H: go back to the site’s homepage (function available, obviously, solely on internal pages).

Images

All the website’s images have alternative descriptive texts.

Tables

The layout pagination does not provide for the use of tables.
In the case of data tables, we use DTD markers and features to describe content and identify the lines and columns.

Forms

We have associated the form titles with the fields that need to be filled out.  We then verified that they were matched correctly by the screen readers.