What is accessibility?
Accessibility is the possibility of accessing information or services without a user’s disability being a potential barrier. These disabilities may be physical, technological or structural in origin. Therefore a tool is accessible when it does not require users to have, permanently or temporarily, a specified level of intelligence, hearing, sight, mobility or ability to remember.
Website accessibility
“la Caixa” Group, and in particular Caixabank Asset Management SGIIC, S.A.U., strives to make its portal and Línea Abierta online banking service accessible, regardless of the kind of hardware, software, network infrastructure, language, culture, geographical location or capacity of their users. The aim is to have accessibility certification for all of the portal’s content and its online banking service. To do this “la Caixa” Group has followed the guidelines issued by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).
The W3C as a guide to web accessibility
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international consortium that sets standards for the World Wide Web. It was set up in the 1990s to encourage the development and inter-operability of the web, emphasising its universality. In 1997, the W3C created the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) to provide guidelines and resources to help make the web accessible. The W3C developed the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), whose main function is to steer the design of web pages towards an accessible model.
Certificates
The web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG 1.0) for level AA web accessibility have already been implemented when constructing the Group’s corporate portals. Nevertheless, the aim is to earn this accessibility certification in every possible area. To meet the requirements set by the WAI, web standards were used in the construction of its pages, using HTML for content and CSS for appearance.For example, the following have been introduced:
- Alert when links open in new windows
- Alert when there is a change of format
- Enlargeable font size
- Alternative texts in images
- Adaptation to voice browsers
- Use of style sheets to control layout and presentation
- Use of header elements to convey the page’s logical structure
- Metadata to add semantic information