CGD Web Portal Fully Accessible and adopts UMIC Accessibility Certification

The automatic evaluation tool of the accessibility guidelines eXaminator (text in portuguese) was developed by UMIC, starting in 2005, to overcome the limitations of other existing evaluation tools and to provide diagnostic information in Portuguese. It has proven to be very useful in the detection and correction of accessibility faults of Web pages by several institutions. The eXaminator (text in portuguese) was designed to be used in a system, also developed by UMIC, that evaluates all the pages of a given domain on the Internet, provides a global index for the level of accessibility of all the domain – the Web@x (text in Portuguese) – and is the basis of a dynamic certification system of accessibility involving the adoption of a Dynamic Accessibility Certification Logo of UMIC (text in Portuguese) that dynamically provides updated information on the evaluation of accessibility of the whole domain at any time.

The new portal of CGD (http://www.cgd.pt), with over 2,800 pages, fully meets accessibility guidelines of the W3C, so it conforms to the AAA accessibility level. It now joins a group of 9 sites owned by UMIC, which together have more than 5,700 pages, tha were the first in Portugal to fully meet the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (AAA level): www.umic.pt, www.acesso.umic.pt, www.diploma.umic.pt, www.b-on.pt, www.redesolidaria.pt, www.rededeespacosinternet.pt, www.internetsegura.pt, www.rcaap.pt, www.gridcomputing.pt).

The fact that CGD has assured full accessibility of its portal is of major importance, not only because it is the first large private site and of a very large financial institution, but also because it has been clearly demonstrated how websites of companies and other entities that use the same type of Microsoft technologies can be made fully accessible.

The total compliance of every page of a particular website with the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines is very rare worldwide (even the page of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG1.0) of the W3C, although having a high accessibility performance does not satisfy fully the guidelines it publicizes, and the same happens with the homepage of the American Foundation for the Blind and many other organizations for people with special needs!).

Version 2.0 of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) was approved on 11 December 2008 after being prepared by an open process with broad international participation for several years. The Knowledge Society Agency (UMIC) took the initiative to readily translated version 2.0 into Portuguese and to provide the translation on the Internet (see Accessibility Guidelines for Web Content 2.0 (WCAG 2.0 W3C) published in Portuguese), making Portuguese to be, in February 25, 2009, the 3rd language in which the new guidelines were published in the world, after only the English (original) and the Hungarian. UMIC is currently developing version 2.0 of its web accessibility evaluation tool – eXaminator (text in portuguese) – that will soon be available for general use, and, as its version 1.0 predecessor can be used to calculate the overall index of web accessibility Web@x (text in Portuguese) and in the Dynamic Accessibility Certification Logo of UMIC (text in Portuguese).

The full accessibility of the portal of CGD, announced on September 17, 2009, is a major step for CGD itself, and for Portugal as well, on the way to ensure better accessibility of Web content to people with disabilities, including blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, learning disabilities, cognitive limitations, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity and combinations of them.