Accessibility Tests For Stanca Act

We've been working on assigning accessibility tests for the Italian Stanca 
Act [1] and I thought we should share this with the ER list.

The Stanca act has 22 requirements for web content that wishes to comply 
with the act. For each requirement we have assigned accessibility tests that 
will test whether content conforms or not. The assignment of these tests has 
been in conjunction with several accessibility experts that are familiar 
with the act but these are still draft. We are hoping that open discussion 
can help us to reach a final set of tests that will determine conformance to 
the act.

The current list of tests assigned to the Stanca act's 22 requirements can 
be found here:
http://tile-cridpath.atrc.utoronto.ca/acheck/servlet/ShowGuide?name=stanca.xml&newsort=guide&lang=eng

Again, this is still draft. Please take a look and let us know your 
comments. There are several requirements for which we have not assigned 
tests and these are still to do.

There are some contentious requirements in the Stanca act but I think we 
should congratulate the Italian government in coming out so strongly in 
favour of making web content accessible. One of the things I found 
surprising is the requirement for web sites to validate as 'strict'. I 
believe that valid code is important for accessibility but the strict 
requirement may be going a bit too far. The 'transitional' doctype may be a 
more realistic target but that is not what is specified by the act.

The question we need to answer is "What are the tests required by the Stanca 
act?". We should not at this time be trying to change the Stanca act but 
only interpret what is already there.

Cheers,
Chris

[1] 
http://www.pubbliaccesso.it/biblioteca/documentazione/guidelines_study/2_technical_reqs.htm

Received on Monday, 27 March 2006 20:08:10 UTC