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COMMUNICATION
Accessibility of the Italian institutional web pages: a survey
on the compliance of the Italian public administration web pages
to the Stanca Act and its 22 technical requirements for web
accessibility
Orazio Gambino •Roberto Pirrone •
Fabrizio Di Giorgio
ÓSpringer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014
Abstract Accessibility of the Italian public administra-
tion web pages is ruled by the Stanca Act and in particular
the Decree of the Minister issued on July 8, 2005. In this
paper, an objective test is performed on the official web
pages of the Italian province and region chief towns to
check their compliance to the 22 technical requirements
defined by the Stanca Act. A sample of 976 web pages
belonging to the websites of the Italian chief towns have
been downloaded in the period October–December 2012.
Such a data collection has been submitted to Achecker, the
worldwide recognized syntax and accessibility validation
service. Several accessibility and syntax errors have been
found following the automatic analysis. Such errors have
been classified, a statistic has been produced, and some
graphs are included to offer an immediate view of the error
distribution. Moreover, the most frequent errors are pointed
out and explained in detail. Although the Stanca Act has
been promulgated some years ago, and contains precise
indications about updating a web page to be compliant to
the 22 technical requirements, all the analyzed websites are
not fully compliant to the law. Updating web pages to be
compliant to the Stanca Act is a slow process and some
grave errors are still present, both in terms of syntax and
accessibility.
Keywords Web accessibility Stanca Act Italian
institutional web pages Web content accessibility
guidelines ISO Rehabilitation act
1 Introduction
Many definitions of ‘‘web content accessibility,’’‘‘web
accessibility,’’ or more simply ‘‘accessibility,’’ can be
found in the literature and on the web. The concept of
accessibility is inspired from the words of Tim Benners
Lee: ‘‘The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by
everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect’’
[1]. So accessibility refers to the property of the web pages
to be used by both non-disabled and disabled people. As a
consequence, web pages must be designed to follow some
technical criteria; for example, the ones defined in the
WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) [2], which
are the basis of the 22 technical requirements of the Stanca
Act.
The Stanca Act is formally named the Act 4 issued on
the January 9, 2004, and takes its name from its promoter,
the Minister Luigi Stanca. Before introducing the content
of this law, it is necessary to consider the international
standards on web accessibility, which are mentioned in the
sources of the Act. The main source is the Web Content
Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). These guidelines are
recognized worldwide as the most influential de facto
standards on web accessibility. They try to meet the needs
of the majority of people with disability; indeed in [3] the
authors report that only 50 % of accessibility problems are
covered by the guidelines. The structure of WCAG
includes general principles and practical guidelines, infor-
mation on most common errors, examples and links to
external sources and codes. The guidelines define four
O. Gambino (&)R. Pirrone F. D. Giorgio
Faculty of Learning Sciences, University of Palermo, Viale delle
Scienze, Building 15, 90128 Palermo, Italy
e-mail: orazio.gambino@unipa.it
R. Pirrone
e-mail: roberto.pirrone@unipa.it
F. D. Giorgio
e-mail: fabri.digiorgio@gmail.com
123
Univ Access Inf Soc
DOI 10.1007/s10209-014-0381-0
basic criteria for web accessibility: perceptible, usable,
understandable, and solid. These four criteria are the
foundation of the 12 guidelines. The guidelines recommend
the basic requirements that guarantee the minimum stan-
dard of accessibility and support the application of the
techniques suggested. Other sources proposing guidelines
on accessibility are indicated in paragraph 1194.22, Sec-
tion 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, which has been enforced
by the US Government. Finally, the standards and specific
techniques on accessibility are also defined by the Inter-
national Organization for Standardization (ISO). All these
standards have been an inspiration to the DM 2005/07/08,
which enforced the Stanca Act in the Italian system. The
primary object of this study is to assess the compliance of
the province chief towns websites with the Italian legisla-
tion in terms of accessibility, by identifying the most
common inconsistencies and their consequences. Further-
more, the study compares the compliance of the Italian
websites, which have been analyzed at a national and
regional level, according to the international standards of
accessibility. The discussion of the methodology and
results obtained is precededbyanintroductiontothe
Stanca Act and international standards on accessibility.
In addition, it is important to clarify that the choice of
setting up the analysis to the province chief towns
websites is due to the features of the Italian local political
organization.
2 Related works
Accessibility is a very important topic in the web related
literature, which covers many issues. One of them consists
of developing automatic/semiautomatic methodologies to
evaluate whether a web page is accessible or not. For this
reason, a considerable number of papers is related to finding
an ‘‘accessibility model,’’ i.e., either a mathematical model
represented by suitable accessibility metrics or a set of
rules. The aim of papers related to this topic is to devise
either a ‘‘score’’ for accessibility of a web page/site or
methodologies for an objective evaluation of accessibility.
A seminal work is the one in [4], where a wide dissertation
is given in this respect. The same authors have also written
an official report on accessibility metrics [5] and a com-
parison among 6 different evaluation tools [6] where the
lack of reliability in the assessment of accessibility is con-
firmed. The authors of the work in [7] report that the sole
use of automatic tools is not sufficient for a correct evalu-
ation of accessibility, but also a manual evaluation is nec-
essary. This is not a novelty because the Stanca Act requires
objective/subjective evaluation by means of automatic tools
and work groups composed of disabled and non-disable
people with different levels of education. Such groups of
users should be interviewed by an expert on cognitive
ergonomy. However, for a preliminary analysis and when a
large number of pages must be analyzed, automatic analysis
is feasible [8]. In [9–11], a metrics according to the Italian
law is given thanks to the Vamola
`project, along with an
evaluation tool. The reader is referred to all the papers
presented in the Online Symposium Website Accessibility
Metrics, which are available freely in [12]. Even though in
[13] the authors draw the conclusion that it is useless to
develop legislation related to accessibility, many govern-
ments in the world have legislation for this topic. Indeed,
another topic in accessibility literature is related to the
compliance to accessibility criteria in both public admin-
istration and relevant public or private organizations web-
sites. The present paper belongs to this category. Even if the
automatic tools and the guidelines are not sufficient to
declare that a web page is accessible, such tools actually are
the sole immediate methods to perform an accessibility
evaluation and their result can be considered preliminary to
a more deep manual evaluation. Solely the most recent
papers have been cited, because the web pages are main-
tained continuously so that the results or conclusions taken
from dated works could be not compliant to the current
situation. In [14], accessibility of some government web-
sites is evaluated using both automatic tools and a work
group composed by people with visual disabilities. In [15], a
study on accessibility of commercial websites belonging to
small and medium enterprises has been presented, while in
[16] also institutional web pages have been analyzed. In
[17], the websites of central government including all
ministries and divisions are analyzed using accessibility
evaluation tools provided by W3C. In [18], accessibility
evaluation of US government websites is performed and the
type of accessibility barriers are listed. In [19], a compar-
ative study of the results on accessibility of Greek gov-
ernment websites obtained in 2004 and 2008 has been
performed. In [20], a study on the compliance of the public
administration websites to accessibility legislation of the
North Ireland has been presented. In [21,22], the authors
analyze the institutional web pages and give indications to
increase accessibility on the basis of the obtained results.
The same is done by the authors of [23] for the Jordanian
e-government websites. An accessibility study for the
Korean institutional websites con be found in [24], and
more recently the authors of [25] criticize the use of par-
ticular software solutions which avoids the use of a variety
operative systems and web browsers, with severe limita-
tions in accessibility.
The aim of the present paper consists in verifying the
respect of the Stanca Act, and in particular the compliance
to the 22 technical requirements defined by the Decree of
Univ Access Inf Soc
123
the Minister issued on the July 8, 2005 (in short DM
2005/07/08). In order to perform such an evaluation,
the web pages of institutional web pages of the Italian
chief towns have been analyzed by means of accessibility
evaluation tools. The correctness of the code syntax has
been checked, also. This paper represents an overview on
accessibility of some of the Italian institutional web pages
which is currently absent in the literature. The paper is
organized as follows. Section 3describes the Italian terri-
tory political subdivision, Sect. 4describes briefly the
Stanca Act and the DM 2005/07/08. Section 5reports the
evaluation techniques that have been adopted, Section 6
reports the results, and in Sects. 7–8, some comments and
conclusions are reported.
3 Italian Geopolitical Organization
The Italian devolution policies have divided the country
into regions, provinces, and municipalities. The Italian
regions are 21 and each of them has a chief town where the
political bodies are located: ‘‘Consiglio’’ and ‘‘Giunta.’’
Regions are divided into provinces. Each province has a
chief town where the provincial administration is located.
A large section of the National Public Administration has
local offices in the provinces, which are located in their
chief towns. Usually, the province chief towns are located
in the most productive areas. A province can have two or
three chief towns: This implies that the province adminis-
trative centers are 110, while the municipalities are 117.
4 The Stanca Act
The Stanca Act is entitled ‘‘Dispositions to enable people
with disability accessing IT.’’ The Act clearly defines two
concepts:
Accessibility: The ability of the IT tools to provide
services and information accessible to people who need
assistive technologies and specific configurations, due to
their disability, without discrimination, taking into
account the limits imposed by technological knowledge.
Assistive technologies: tools and technical solutions,
hardware and software, which allow persons with
disability to access information and services provided
by IT systems, overcoming or reducing disadvantages.
The Stanca Act is aimed at adapting the Italian legislation
to the international standards as regards accessibility. In
order to achieve this goal, experts from the public admin-
istration, disability associations, The Italian National
Research Council, universities, and software producers
worked as a team, giving a professional contribution to the
drafting of the DM 2005/07/08 as required by the article 11
of the law. The study conducted by the team of experts has
been divided into two parts: technical assessment of the
websites’ content as regards accessibility; usability ana-
lysis of information and services as regards their efficiency
and simplicity, also considering effectiveness and user
satisfaction. Twenty-two accessibility technical require-
ments as well as some methodological criteria to perform
the assessment originated from such a study. The imple-
mentation of the technical requirements includes texts such
as the syntax of programming languages, as well as the
graphic aspects such as the adequate choice of color con-
trast between the text and the background. The strict
implementation of all the requirements is considered the
minimum level of accessibility, which is mandatory for all
the websites and services of the public administration. The
authors of the present paper refer the reader to the web
page in [26] where the complete list of the technical
requirements stated in the DM 2005/07/08 is freely
available.
5 Material and methods
The present study analyzes the websites of the major Italian
chief towns. Web pages have been accessed during the per-
iod October–December 2012. The contents provided in these
websites were too extensive and articulated to be explored
deeply; therefore, the search strategy was limited to the
second page level. On the other hand, a simple analysis of
homepages would have achieved too superficial results to
address the goal of the study. Limiting the analysis to the
second-level pages prevented the researchers from reaching
external domains, which were excluded form the study. In
case the number of downloaded web pages was too scarce,
the depth was increased to the third and fourth level: This is
the case of the regions Basilicata (7 web pages), Valle
d’Aosta (5 web pages), Marche (11 web pages) Trentino-
Alto Adige (15 web pages). A discussion on different sam-
pling methods and their effects on results can be found in
[27]. The HTTrack software has been used to perform the
analysis. HTTrack is a free software with GPL licensing, and
it was chosen for its clarity and usability as well as for the
reliability. Such a software was used to download all files
included in the server of the chief towns’ websites main-
taining their original structure in order to verify which pages
were included in the first and second page level. The tests
were performed in three steps using three online validation
services: W3C Validator, CSS Validation Service, and
Univ Access Inf Soc
123
AChecker. The downloaded pages were assessed according
to three different criteria:
– correctness of the HTML syntax (W3C Validator),
– correctness of the CSS syntax (CSS Validation
Service),
– compliance with the 22 technical requirement as stated
in the Stanca Act (AChecker).
The reports produced by the validation services mentioned
above allowed the research group to identify errors at each
step of the analysis. Each error has been stored in a database
that has been set up purposely. HTML and CSS validations
are provided by the W3C directly, and they assessed whether
the syntax met the official language references. AChecker is
a free online validation service, which has been designed to
assess accessibility of website contents. It was chosen to
select the appropriate guidelines to use in the analysis of the
website contents. The guidelines used in this study were the
22 requirements of the Stanca Act. This software tool allows
accessing all the internal mechanisms and control systems,
identifying errors and offering possible solutions. The
authors noticed a discrepancy between the results appearing
on the web page and those saved in the pdf report, which is
created by AChecker. In particular, accessibility errors were
not present on the pdf report. At last, AChecker allows
identifying known problems, likely problems and probable
problems (warnings). Only the known problems were con-
sidered in this study.
6 Results
Nine hundred and seventy-six web pages have been
downloaded. Both accessibility and syntax errors have
been found following the analysis. In particular, 18,338
errors in the html/xhtml code, 1,516 errors in the CSS code,
9,334 errors related to missed accessibility technical
requirements. Such results justify the choice to analyze the
websites until the second level of the website tree. In
Fig. 1, the bar graph relating the number of errors versus
accessibility requirements summarizes the results of
accessibility analysis for the entire dataset. Requirements
not appearing in the figure have been respected by all the
pages we analyzed. In particular, Table 2lists the most
frequent accessibility errors reported along with the num-
ber each of them has been encountered and the related
requirement in the Stanca Act. In Table 1, the mean errors
for each Italian region is given. In particular, the columns
show the name of the region, the mean value of the HTML
errors, the mean value of the CSS errors, and the mean
value of the requirements errors, respectively. Considering
the overall errors, the best-performing region is the Tren-
tino-Alto Adige, considering the overall errors. Indeed, for
some regions, a high value of HTML mean errors could
correspond to a low value of requirement mean errors and
viceversa. The CSS mean errors column shows the lowest
values, if compared with the other ones. The number of
errors, in general, is not strictly related to the number of
Fig. 1 Number of errors versus
technical requirements
Univ Access Inf Soc
123
pages. Indeed, a less number of the pages does not imply a
proportional decreasing of the errors, in general.
7 Comments
The present work is aimed at presenting an overview of
the Italian situation as regards accessibility in the websites
of some public administrations such as the chief towns of
Italian provinces. The analysis has not to be regarded as a
ranking of the Italian regions in this respect. The analysis
has been performed until either the second-level or the
fourth-level web pages, in some cases, and a large number
of accessibility errors have been recognized, which
involve at least 10 of the 22 technical requirements stated
in the Stanca Act. Such errors are not marginal ones as
regards both their amount and their relevance. In Table 2,
the errors detected by AChecker are listed along with the
reference to the corresponding requirement. Each
requirement can refer to more than one error. Require-
ment 1 regards a fundamental property of a web page, i.e.,
its DTD (document type definition). An accessible web
page must own a strict type DTD. Missing this require-
ment is related to errors 225 and 232: The former is
related to the absence of a strict type DTD in the DOC-
TYPE declaration, while the latter shows that the code
does not match the rules of the formal grammar defined
by the DTD. More than 1,000 errors are related to
Requirement 1 as it can be seen also in Fig. 1where the
height of the bar related to such a requirement is the sum
of the occurrences associated with the errors 225 and 232.
Requirement 2 regards the use of frames in a web page:
Such a programming practice is obsolete, even if the
browsers still support it to run old pages. Errors 233 and
234 are related to this. They show, respectively, that the
\frameset[and \frame[have been used in the
code. Fortunately, such a bad programming practice has
been rarely noticed. Requirement 6 regards colors to be
used as foreground (typically text) and background. The
contrast between the two colors is computed both on tint
and luminance according to the equations in [28]. Errors
227, 228, and 229 are referred to this requirement. The
first error refers to the poor contrast between the link text
and the background, while the others refer to the active
Table 2 Most frequent accessibility errors
Error type N. of
errors
Requirement
Check 90: script must have a nonscript
section
2,582 15
Check 102: SCRIPT not keyboard
accessible—onclick missing onkeypress
1,942 16
Check 1: img element missing alt attribute 1,120 3
Check 232: Document does not validate 963 1
Check 107: onmouseover event handler
missing onfocus event handler
671 16
Check 106: script not keyboard accessible—
onmouseout missing onblur
598 16
Check 175: Anchor contains redundant text 489 19
Check 114: Layout table has a summary 355 13
Check 225: Strict doctype is not declared 354 1
Check 115: Layout table contains a caption 153 13
Check 121: input element, type of ‘‘radio,’’
missing an associated label
21 14
Check 119: input element, type of
‘‘checkbox,’’ missing an associated label
18 14
Check 118: input element, type of
‘‘password,’’ missing an associated label
15 14
Check 165: embed missing alt attribute 9 15
Check 234: frame element used 9 2
Check 229: Poor contrast between visited
link text and background color (WAI ERT
algorithm)
96
Check 228: Poor contrast between active
link text and background color (WAI ERT
algorithm)
96
Check 227: Poor contrast between link text
and background color (WAI ERT
algorithm)
96
Check 233: frameset element used 6 2
Table 1 Mean errors distribution per Italian region
Region N.
pages
HTMLerror CSSerror Req:error
Abruzzo 41 5.90 0.17 4.98
Basilicata 38 2.82 1.42 14.84
Calabria 33 12.33 0.61 10.21
Campania 34 13.09 1.00 7.94
Emilia Romagna 45 3.11 2.80 6.47
Friuli Venezia Giulia 33 42.52 1.33 3.33
Lazio 46 21.20 3.63 10.72
Liguria 33 78.03 0.79 4.15
Lombardia 111 24.78 0.65 8.88
Marche 52 8.10 0.31 11.69
Molise 34 20.03 2.26 42.91
Piemonte 49 3.78 3.49 5.41
Puglia 68 46.59 5.63 14.75
Sardegna 67 30.01 1.07 11.19
Sicilia 59 14.93 1.12 9.07
Toscana 72 10.21 2.19 7.71
Trentino-Alto Adige 47 0.38 0.02 2.43
Umbria 36 7.44 0.00 5.08
Valle D’aosta 35 13.71 0.09 5.11
Veneto 43 10.35 0.44 6.77
Univ Access Inf Soc
123
and visited link text, respectively. The table shows that
this rule is unattended rarely. Indeed, a person with low
vision, but also people with full vision, could encounter
difficulties in reading the text, if it is not well distin-
guishable from the background. Requirement 13 is
debatable. It is related to the use of a table as layout of a
web page in order to place the elements in established
positions. Such a programming practice is obsolete, mis-
leading and substantially wrong. Indeed, the \table[
element must be used exclusively to present a collection
of data in contemporary web design, while the layout
must be created by means of either fixed or liquid box
structure. In terms of universal accessibility, regarding
non-disabled people, the use of liquid box is strongly
suggested, because it suits the layout to the screen reso-
lution so that the user is not forced to manually change
the settings on his/her computer. Indeed, the concept of
accessibility can be extended to the fruition of the infor-
mation and its easy reachability from non-disabled people.
However, once the table is used to create the page layout,
it should not contain a caption (error 115) and the
summary attribute must not be present or it must have an
empty value or non printable characters (error 144).
Requirement 14 regards the forms and imposes that the
widgets must be associated with the respective labels.
Errors 118, 119, and 121 are related to this requirement.
In particular, they show the lack of label for \input[
elements with type attribute set to password,
checkbox and radio, respectively. Requirement 15 is
related to scripts, applets, and embedded objects. If they
are disabled, the page has to be still usable. If it is not
possible, a valid textual alternative must be implemented.
Indeed, error 90 indicates that the noscript section is
absent and error 165 shows that the alt attribute (alter-
native text) is absent for the \embed[element. All the
errors related to the alt attribute are very important for
visually impaired people. Indeed, if it is absent or it
contains an empty value, a text-reader application or a
Braille display cannot show the equivalent information of
the visual element, such as an image or other. Errors 102,
106, and 107 are related to the requirement 16, which in
turn involves the use of scripts, applets, and embedded
objects. In particular, this requirement imposes that they
must be device independent. The first error shows that
each onclick event must have a corresponding on-
keypress event with the same functionality. The second
error is similar to the preceding one and involves on-
mouseout and onblur, while the third one holds for
onmouseover and onfocus. Indeed, for people with
motor disability, in particular if the illness affects the
upper limbs, the use of the mouse could be impossible to
interact with the screen. The onkeypress as alternative
to the attributes related to the mouse control must be
present because the device belonging to the assistive
technology can easily interpret the interaction way
expressed by a button. Requirement 19 concerns the
textual redundancy in the \a[element, when it includes a
\img[element. In this case, alternative text (i.e., the
alt attribute) must not be the same of the anchor text.
Error 175 accounts for this requirement. The following
HTML code reports the error:
8 Conclusions
The analysis performed in this work is sufficient to claim
that the Italian institutional websites considered in this
work are not accessible. Such conclusions are asserted also
in the report on accessibility of the Italian Ministry for
public administrations [29]:
A fronte di situazioni di eccellenza, molti siti web
pubblici non permettono a tutti i cittadini un pieno
accesso ai servizi erogati sul web e non risultano
totalmente accessibili. (In view of excellent situa-
tions, many public websites does not allow to all
citizens a full access to the services provided on the
web, and they are not fully accessible).
Even if the statement of conformity to the Stanca Act is
often present in the institutional websites, in some cases
they does not even pass the syntax test, which should be a
prerequisite for accessibility. Indeed, the W3C releases a
HTML code snippet containing an icon pointing to the
validation service to be inserted in a web page whose
contents passed the test. In some cases, a page contains the
snippet though when one presses the link the test is not
passed. Probably, such pages had passed the test in their
previous versions but recent modifications have not been
tested, while making new coding errors. In many cases, the
web pages cannot be browsed using keyboard and often
there is no guide on how to fill a form, when it is present.
Moreover, in some cases the link is not self-explanatory.
Accessibility is not a crucial property for a commercial
website, while the graphical aspect is fundamental to be
attractive to the potential customers. Instead, accessibility
should be the most important feature in an institutional
website because the contents must be read by both disabled
and non-disabled people. The Stanca Act refers to an old
technology, and some programming methodologies allow
to implement some solutions, which should be mandatory
for their particularly usefulness. As an example, it is
Univ Access Inf Soc
123
possible to change the style sheet on the fly thanks to the
implementation of particular scripts so that many features
of the web page can be changed. This is an important task
when people with low vision, or also non-disable people,
want to increase the font size. Indeed, if the web page
provides such a control, some modifications of the page
layout are also necessary. In a few words, HTML/XHTML
and CSS technologies are not sufficient to generate all the
effects and functions, which are needed to manage font size
properly. For this reason, many scripts are now included
into the browsers, so it is not necessary to download and
install any plug-in to achieve proper functioning, and no
particular technical skills are required to the user. How-
ever, despite the usefulness of a script aimed to increase the
font size for both visually impaired and non-disabled
people, the functionality described above is not imple-
mented in many public administration web pages and it is
delegated to the browser, which performs a more or less
accurate graphical zoom without any control on the page
layout. On the other hand, the Stanca Act is inspired from
the WCAG 1.0 Level A and the Rehabilitation Act—Sec-
tion 508, while the WCAG 2.0 is already available. As a
consequence, the Italian legislation is not able to follow the
technology evolution and some requirements could be
considered not compliant to the contemporary software
technology. In [30], an evaluation of Stanca act related to
WCAG 2.0 is given. Only recently, the technical require-
ments of the Stanca Act have been updated in date March
20, 2013, to the WCAG 2.0 level AA; however, the data of
the present study were acquired at the end of 2012 so the
old requirements were applied. Of course, a new study is
planned in the next future. However, before the current
legislation, the websites of the Italian public administration
were created without following any design criterion. Often
their creation was delegated to few employees able to work
with WYSIWYG [(What You See Is What You Get)]
editors and such pages were created in a playful way;
indeed, they were full of animations, sounds, and other
graphics effects as employees acting as ‘‘web designer’’
were often influenced by the design style of videogames,
which was the only design style intuitively learned.
‘‘Moreover, the page layout is not homogeneous for web-
sites related to the same kind of administration bodies: This
fact implies that the user has to learn how to access the
information for each website with an evident reduction in
usability. One could say that this heterogeneity is an added
value aimed at distinguishing a city from another one;
however, different website organization is not a desirable
feature. The different arrangement of pages for each web-
site depends on the contents and services that a municipality
provides to citizens. For this reason, a different number of
web pages have been downloaded even if the same level of
depth is selected. In terms of accessibility, the URL of an
institutional website should be easy to remember. An
ordinary rule, which holds for commercial websites, con-
sists of including the name of the brand or the name of the
company as a part of the URL, so that the potential customer
can find the website without the use of a search engine. A
similar rule should be used for the institutional websites.
Indeed, in some cases the chief town web address has the
format www:comune:\name of the city [:it where
‘‘comune’’ stands for town council, municipality. In many
other cases, such a principle is not respected, as in the case
of Florence (www.comune.fi.it) and Padova (www.padova
net.it). Such websites had been created at different times
and in different Internet domains, without a common
strategy. Even if ANCI (Italian Municipalities National
Association) exists, no actions have been embarked in this
sense. All these considerations could seem far from the
common concept of accessibility, which is strictly related to
the disabled people. But the interpretation of accessibility in
terms of ‘‘universal accessibility,’’ already mentioned in the
‘‘Comments’’ section, is also a valid interpretation as all the
users have the same rights to access information in a secure,
easy, and fast way, above all intuitive. At the end, the
limited accessibility of institutional websites is not only an
Italian phenomenon: Many other countries does not provide
accessible institutional websites; many authors cited in the
‘‘Related works’’ section report many e-government web-
sites of their country. This work is also aimed at raising
interest in the international debate on accessibility evalua-
tion and the improvement of accessibility in web design
[31–34].
Acknowledgments The authors express their gratefulness to Mar-
gherita Di Giorgio (Specialist Social Worker) and Miss Gaetana
Scalici for their kind support.
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