Mancini Cristina, Zedda Monica, Barbaro Annarita
Istituto Superiore di Sanità, Library-Serials Department, Rome, Italy.
Health Info Libr J. 2005 Dec;22(4):276-85. doi: 10.1111/j.1471-1842.2005.00602.x.
In January 2004, the Italian government passed new legislation designed to give people with disabilities access to online services. Starting from the new legislation requirements, the purpose of this study is to investigate whether Italian Local Health Authorities websites are accessible to users with different abilities.
One hundred and seventy websites were analysed evaluating their compliance to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Priority 1 guidelines via a combination of appropriate accessibility testing methods. This review was carried out twice: the first time it took place between the end of 2003 and May-June 2004. The same survey was repeated again in December 2004, after the issuing of the draft of the Implementation Regulations for The Stanca Law in July 2004. In this second survey, all the websites analysed before were checked again to establish if some measures to make those sites accessible were taken.
Seventy-six per cent of the analysed websites fail to satisfy the most basic W3C requirements, but Italian Local Health Authorities websites are likely to present significant improvements to access for some disabled user groups: the number of accessible websites increased consistently between the first and the second review.
It seems that awareness of web accessibility issues is increasing among developers of health information websites because of law enforcement. Recommendations for future research and development are offered.
2004年1月，意大利政府通过了一项新立法，旨在让残疾人能够使用在线服务。从新立法要求出发，本研究的目的是调查意大利地方卫生当局的网站对于不同能力的用户是否可访问。
通过结合适当的可访问性测试方法，对170个网站进行分析，评估它们对万维网联盟（W3C）一级指南的遵守情况。这项审查进行了两次：第一次在2003年底至2004年5月至6月期间进行。在2004年7月《斯坦卡法实施条例》草案发布后，于2004年12月再次进行了相同的调查。在第二次调查中，对之前分析过的所有网站再次进行检查，以确定是否采取了一些使这些网站可访问的措施。
76%的被分析网站未满足W3C最基本的要求，但意大利地方卫生当局的网站可能会为一些残疾用户群体的访问带来显著改善：在第一次和第二次审查之间，可访问网站的数量持续增加。
由于执法，健康信息网站开发者对网络可访问性问题的认识似乎在提高。并提供了对未来研究和开发的建议。
